


The Oak Queen

by klmeri



Series: Otherworld [2]
Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Action/Adventure, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Missing in Action
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-02
Updated: 2012-06-29
Packaged: 2018-01-09 14:34:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klmeri/pseuds/klmeri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to The Desert Children.   Kirk, Spock, and McCoy reunite, but they soon learn an otherworld, while easy to enter, is impossible to leave - particularly when it is conspiring to keep one of them forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Where a Tale Begins

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not good at abandoning stories. In fact, over the past week or so, the continuation of The Desert Children has been brewing in my mind. Now I have some idea of how this strange story ends. It will be told in five parts, as noted above. However you label the story's genre (i.e. supernatural, otherworldly, fae, fantasy-driven or horror-esque), the prose shall remain slightly surreal, with a dusting of reality. I cannot say at this point if we will see much of what is going on outside of this "other realm", only that what happens there is dependent on the journey of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Who knows... maybe there will be an happily-ever-after for everyone! (Which, if I may say this, was not the original intention - and was part of the reason why I had to step back and re-evaluate the plot.)

Every tale comes from a strange place. Leonard has decided his entire reality is a tale, both unusual in its origins and oddly fascinating when recounted. He met Gram who was possibly a beast beneath her skin but saved his life, only to abandon him later on. He discovered spellbound tree children, and he traded with a troll that recognized a man's dreams by scent. He fell half in-love with a bird-woman who sang more sweetly than heaven itself and looked like fire; and an enchantment almost drowned him in a river as deep and black as midnight.

Yet the tale of his life continues to grow stranger.

Unfortunately Leonard has no time to share his musings or his misgivings. Sir Rowan spares no concern for them. Instead he whistles, an irritating habit that prevails whether Leonard is silent or shouting. With the forest shades at their back and a gloomy trail of ghostlight to follow, nothing perturbs the Guide, not even the occasional echoing bark of laughter from an unseen fox.

Leonard tries to interrupt Rowan's jaunty tune but his companion only increases volume like a bird lauding the arrival of morning. As a slow morning-riser, there's nothing Leonard hates worse. "Don't you know another song?" he grumbles to the swishing cloak in front of him, which changes from one iridescent color to the next as it sways.

"I have no new songs, Doctor," Rowan says cheerfully. "Only the oldest in the world."

"And I don't suppose I could persuade you to stop?"

"Are you so frequently ill-tempered?"

"Only when I'm lost in the woods with an off-key cuckoo!"

Apparently this comeback is quite hilarious. Leonard, hearing the sudden crack of twigs underfoot nearby, snaps nervously at Rowan to be quiet.

The man in the top hat ceases laughing and adjusts the angle of his spectacles with an impish grin. "Doctor, Doctor, do not be so wary. 'Tis only the wind."

Leonard shoots him a bland look. "Last time you said it was a squirrel."

"Ah. Then let us say it is a squirrel, for consistency's sake."

"It's not a squirrel, is it?"

"No." Sir Rowan's amusement dims somewhat as he looks into the crowd of trees. "I think, perhaps, you would prefer to be ignorant of what lives in this forest, Doctor. I would," he adds calmly.

Leonard resolves then and there not to ask about the squirrel-that-isn't. His Guide is right: he would prefer ignorance, if only to save himself from nightmares. "Can we get out of here?" The question is plaintive, close to a plea.

Rowan turns away with a slight nod. "The path's end is just ahead."

Having no choice but to believe him, Leonard sighs and motions for Sir Rowan to keep walking. When the whistling starts up again, he grits his teeth and endures it.

~~~

Jim turns his boot upside down and watches water and riverweeds pour out of it. "That was... not fun," he mutters.

His First Officer's silence is a cold rebuff. Jim can't blame him. Spock didn't enjoy reeling him out of the river in the least—especially considering Jim had not listened to Spock's sage advice to leave it alone in the first place.

But that odd light had appeared, and then an ethereal river woman had risen from the surface like the mythical Venus, calling him to her...

Jim slaps his boot against his wet pants leg for good measure before stuffing his foot back into it. He shrugs off his embarrassment like an unwanted blanket and fixes Gram with a hard stare. "You said there was a bridge. Where is it?"

She's laughing at him, he can tell, though her face reveals little of her mirth.

"The bridge is ready now."

So, he had to nearly drown and get eaten by water harpy before the bridge could appear? Jim is close to snapping out how illogical that is, but he glances at Spock and wisely says nothing.

Gram, taking for granted they will follow where she leads, moves away from the river's edge and onto a well-trodden dirt path.

"Jim," Spock says.

He looks in the direction of Spock's gaze and sees it—the distant outline of a stone bridge. One end of it set against the bank is faintly visible; its opposite end is not, nor is the other side of the river. Where it takes them, he thinks, is probably more dependent on where they want to go rather than where physics dictates they should be. It makes perfect sense then that he thinks only of McCoy from the moment they step onto the bridge until the moment it deposits them in a far stranger land than the desert they had left behind.

"Doctor McCoy is here?" He seeks reassurance as he observes green, mountainous hills and waves of forest.

"We must be quick" is Gram's off-hand answer. "His journey is near its end."

Clueless as to the direction of his Chief Medical Officer, Jim is at a loss to determine the shortest route by himself. He punches down frustration for the umpteenth time. This guide of theirs has promised to take them to Bones but it goes against Jim's natural instinct to allow someone else the lead in the search of his officer. What if she breaks her promise and leaves Spock and him stranded in this no-man's land? They don't have bearings on where they are, let alone a clear understanding of it.

It should never be said that Jim Kirk is opposed to exploring. Why else would he crave to be in space? Spock's feelings reflect his own, Kirk knows, albeit with a distinction for and a love of the science of exploration. What they can learn, the discoveries they can make, the new paths they can forge through the stars for others to follow someday—all of it is the reward for the risks of being an explorer and in particular a leader of explorers. So Jim cannot claim to be frightened of this strange otherworld because the adventurer in him is shouting with joy.

Yet dire circumstances can cloud even the purest happiness.

That cannot matter, Jim realizes. Gram may walk away in the next moment but he and Spock will continue on. Starfleet trains its officers to adapt when necessary, so they will do exactly as they must. These natural worries crowding together in the back of his mind might have substance to them but they cannot stand against his conviction for duty—whether that duty is to the adventurer singing in his heart or to the friend he is determined to find.

Still, though Jim isn't afraid, he also isn't a fool. He smiles faintly at the small woman focused on his reactions. "We're at your mercy, Gram," he tells her.

"You are." Then Gram, visage grim, considers the unspoken invitation—and caution—presented by this new realm. "All paths spiral to the world's heart," she says. "All paths are dangerous. But there is one which is more dangerous than most."

Jim finishes that train of thought for her. "And the most dangerous path is the fastest way to McCoy."

It's a decision they must make.

Because he has not come alone and his mission is of a personal nature, Jim looks to the Vulcan standing beside him. "My choice need not be yours, Spock."

Spock asks Gram, "You indicated it is urgent we reach Doctor McCoy soon. Why?"

The answer is reluctant when it comes, like a truth that has serious repercussions once revealed: "He goes to the Queen."

"What happens then?" Jim gently presses for more information.

He is shocked by the sorrow in Gram's dark eyes. She says, "What happened to me."

~~~

Much to Leonard's surprise, Sir Rowan does not lead him from the labyrinth of trees, only deeper into it. The firebird's forest changes with a single step across some elusive boundary, from a moonless night to a relentlessly sunny day. Thin saplings and old pines give way to mammoth-sized trees, like redwoods, spiraling high out of sight and strung with garlands of captive starlight. Mingling branches create pathways bridged with vines. Occasionally faces peer out of shadowed hutches made from bark and woven leaves.

"It's a city," Leonard says wonderingly.

Fondness and a hint of something sadder but fleeting touch the corners of Rowan's mouth. "Yes. Only the grandiose and atypical will do. No fishing villages or shepherd huts for our kind."

Leonard frowns, not understanding who that barb is meant for, if anyone at all. Then he considers why they are here. "I'm not climbing one of those," he says peremptorily, turning to meet an argument head-on.

Rowan looks more amused. "Doctor, we are not apes. We have stairs."

Leonard draws a breath, looses it wearily. Of course. _Stairs_.

And they are many, breaking free from the ground like roots at the base of a tree whose girth is so wide Leonard could not encompass it with his arms if he tried. The stairs wind steeply upward like a natural extension of the tree trunk. Leonard cannot fathom how they were constructed.

When Rowan and Leonard approach the stairs, a pair of men makes a silent appearance, armed only with a sense of purpose. Leonard examines the plain but elegant cut of their clothes and knows these men are, like Rowan, not ordinary.

"Guards?" he murmurs.

"Sentinels." To the sentinels, Rowan says humbly, "We wish to enter the city."

One of them asks in a soft tenor, "What is your purpose?"

Sir Rowan bows at the waist and introduces himself. "I am the Guide of this mortal. It is with the Queen that our purpose lies."

The sentinels step aside but Leonard lingers a moment to look them over, equally perturbed and fascinated by their mixture of child-like and exotic features. They have slightly too-large eyes, high cheekbones and pale, almost translucent skin. They could not be called delicate but rather sinewy, like tall willows that are too supple and too strong to break in harsh winds. One sentinel has long, sun-colored hair tucked behind ears which end in delicate points. The other man of onyx hair has rounded ears like Leonard's yet that is the only feature which makes the sentinel seem different. Certainly their imposing silence does not invite Leonard to ask why.

With dismay, McCoy becomes acutely aware of how bedraggled and grubby he must seem in comparison. He self-consciously rubs one thumb over the ring on his smallest finger. It is the only thing of value he carries but surely its small gem is worth nothing to them. _He_ is worth nothing—that much Leonard can read in the disinterested set of their faces.

Rowan catches his attention and motions for Leonard to follow him. They embark on the staircase, which is a narrow passageway always lit by a soft glow just beyond sight. Leonard's legs should hurt from the lengthy climb but he feels no discomfort. At some point in time he realizes, though he and Rowan are ascending the same set of stairs, they are no longer circling the same tree.

The stairs abruptly stop at a platform. Leonard steels himself to look down from its edge and inhales deeply at the distance to the ground. "How can you live up here and not be afraid of falling?"

"One becomes accustomed. Also," Rowan spares a somewhat sharp glance at McCoy, "we are known to some as the Children of the Wood. The trees welcome us; they would not betray our steps."

"What about mine?" he mutters.

Rowan gives no indication of hearing him. But minutes later, as they cross of a bridge swaying with a gentle wind and begin to climb another set of curving stairs, Leonard’s Guide says, "The trees dare not risk your life, Doctor. They may welcome us, but that is not to say it is a welcome without fear."

~~~

"When you can go no farther," Gram had said to Jim and Spock once she led them to the foot of a mountain which had seemingly appeared from nowhere, "you must jump."

 _Jump?_ Jim thinks sourly, wincing as rock slices into the pads of his fingers. He feels for the next foothold and drags himself upward another six inches. _We're on a mountain and she wants us to jump off?_

Above him a shelf juts invitingly from the mountain-side. If he can reach it, he can rest. He only need haul his tired body these last five feet and—

The sweat on his unprotected hands causes his grip to slip, and for one agonizing second, Jim teeters and believes he is going to fall. In the next second he flattens himself against the cliff face and stills, though his heart dances wildly in his chest. Wind ruffles his hair mischievously while he pants in short, fitful breaths. A bead of sweat traces the curve of his jaw and drips off his chin, then plunges into the darkness of a bottomless crevice far below.

Spock, a few feet down, has gone rigid as well. Jim is tempted to peek down but he knows he will only see the dirt-dusted crown of Spock's head. Jim imagines his appearance fares no better.

He shouts against the wind instead, "I'm fine! Just resting a moment."

Spock could so easily call him on the lie, but the Vulcan only shouts back, "The ledge would be more suitable to enjoy a respite, Captain."

He dares not laugh, lest it dislodge him and send him to his death. Spock, of course, might try to catch him on the way down and that would likely mean they'd both die. Jim exhales slowly and turns his head to look upward, scraping his cheek as he does so, to judge the handholds within reach. Resolutely, he reaches for the closest one.

There's no point in quitting now. They can't stay stuck on this rock-face forever. They have to reach the top of the mountain—and then, according to Gram, jump. If she's still at the bottom of the mountain observing their progress, undoubtedly she will not miss that part.

Jim cannot recall, as he finally makes it to the ledge and then leans over its edge to grimly wait for Spock, why in the world he thought she was worth trusting.

~~~

"If I never climb another mountain, I will die happy."

Spock simply looks at his Captain. It had been part of his failure of foresight not to bring a jet-pack. When Jim does climb another mountain—and somehow Spock anticipates this event as inevitable—he can simply offer the man the easiest route to the top. Which Jim will refuse, of course, given his peculiar nature.

Surprised by that train of thought, Spock turns his mind to their current situation. The ledge, according to Jim, had been simply that: a ledge. But when Spock had gripped its edge and hauled himself onto it, he had seen that they had reached the mountain's peak. He observed as much but Jim had looked at him strangely. Once Jim had turned around and saw what he said was the truth, Kirk had been unable to speak, so surprised was he. Spock does not doubt Jim had crawled onto a ledge. Spock also does not doubt they are now at the pinnacle of their destination.

Logic, Spock has determined, has little bearing in this world. At times he has floundered to understand how certain events could occur, until he figured out the only coping mechanism for the gaps his mind could not fill with scientific explanation would be to attempt no explanation at all.

Beside him, Jim stands up and brushes the dirt from his pants. "Should we go see what's so important about the top of this mountain, Mr. Spock?"

A rhetorical question. Humans are fond of them. Spock inclines his head rather than answering.

Oddly, Jim's communicator hisses to life. They pause to inspect it, because both of their communicators had malfunctioned and stopped working the moment the sun set into twilight over the desert, but the communicator makes no other sound. Jim replaces it on his belt with care.

The shallow crater ahead of them is enshrouded by mist. They circle the lip of the crater while Spock uses his tricorder to scan the toxicity of the air and soil; but as has happened so often since the journey began, the readings are too scattered to draw a conclusion. Spock resorts to examining the earth by smell, but he detects no sulfurous odor. Jim, who is more accepting that they are in no danger from their environment, points out a route which would be safe to descend and is already skidding down it by the time Spock has delineated the probable pitfalls. He follows, his boots causing pebbled rock to dislodge and shower the crater floor. The pebbles are white, Spock notes upon inspection, perhaps calcified.

"Spock!"

He drops a perfectly round pebble to the ground and strides to Kirk's side. "Captain?"

Jim is staring through the mist. "I thought I saw—but I couldn't have."

Spock absorbs the disbelief in his companion's face before turning to look himself. What he sees, though it is only a glimpse, surprises him as well. "Fascinating."

"It's a tree," Kirk says with incredulity.

As they walk toward it, the mist parts and falls away, settling over the crater floor and, Spock would almost suppose if it weren't too illogical, turning into tiny, glistening white stones.

Jim and Spock are almost within reach of the tree's long leafless branches when Spock's communicator turns on. A voice, distorted by the crackle of static, snaps over the line, "Hey you, stay away from my tree!"

Spock pulls it from his belt and looks at it for a long moment. Jim joins him in looking. Then they consider the tree.

To test his hypothesis, Spock takes two steps forward.

"I said stop!" shrieks the communicator.

Spock raises an eyebrow but silently leaves the next course of action to his captain. Jim approaches a low-hanging branch. When he puts a hand against the tree's trunk, it shudders, dropping flakes of old bark. Mist rises up from the crater floor, an ominous billow of white. Spock says quickly to the area at large, for those who need to hear the words, "We mean you no harm." The mist subsides.

Jim waits a moment. In the silence he begins, "I am Captain Kirk of the starship—"

"Yeah, yeah, I don't care who ye be, Captain Dirk. Just keep your Greenman away from my tree!" This time the voice filters through Jim's communicator.

"Captain _Kirk_. And that man is my First Officer, Mr. Spock."

"He looks like a Greenman to me. He's not welcome. Scat!"

"Says who?" Jim challenges mildly.

"Me!"

Spock believes he understands what Jim is doing. He voices the supposition, "If we cannot speak to you in person, we cannot assume you exist."

High up in the tree, a limb twitches and a grumble rattles down through the branches. Over Spock's communicator, the voice is saying, "Greenman thinks he knows something—fools, thieves— _fine!_ "

A small shadow suddenly hops down to the lowest branch. It bares its pointed teeth at them, coalescing into a squat, gnarled-looking creature. "I am Keeper of the Tree," the creature says into a communicator in his hand.

Jim and Spock's communicators resound clearly with the words.

Spock doesn't need to see Jim's face to comprehend his shock. "How—Where did you get that?" Kirk demands from one breath to the next.

The creature (could it be considered a man? it is a biped and somewhat humanoid, Spock wonders) snaps the communicator's lid shut with a growl. "It's mine!"

Jim narrows his eyes. "That device is Starfleet-issued property. Who would give you...?"

"Doctor McCoy," Spock surmises.

The creature chortles. "Dinner, you mean." He chortles again, an unnerving sound. "It was a fair trade."

Spock asks, "Do you know the location of Doctor McCoy?"

It eyes him distrustfully from where it is hunkered on the branch and answers instead to Jim, "Why would I know that?" Then, more sharply, "What do you want with my tree?"

"We need to reach McCoy. We chose this path." He does not mention Gram specifically, which is a tactic of caution Spock approves of.

The creature is silent for some seconds, as if it is hearing words Jim did not say. "The Tree cannot help you."

"What about you?" Kirk asks.

"I am part of the Tree." The creature goes to the trunk and scales it with clawed hands. "I want nothing from you, and if you were wise, you would ask nothing of me."

"Did McCoy pass through here? When?" Jim wants to know.

"Here, _here?_ " It stops climbing toward a new perch in order to grumble. "Bah! Of course not! Why should he come to the top of the world? We were in the borderlands then—but I'll say no more! What business is that of Captain Kurt and his Greenman? Be gone!" Then a shadow swallows the creature and they can see it no more.

Jim tries calling the Keeper back but to no avail. He folds his arms before turning to Spock. "Suggestions, Spock?"

"Can we go no farther?" He means the question to be musing but Jim's face turns grim.

"'Jump,' she said," he repeats softly. The Captain slowly spins in a circle, surveying the crater. It is empty except for the large tree. He frowns. "We're not jumping off the mountain."

"That would seem illogical," Spock agrees.

Then Jim's gaze makes its way back to the tree, standing alone and deeply rooted in the mountain. "But I can—" Rather than finishing that statement, Kirk does the unexpected. He leaps upward, planting one boot against the tree trunk for leverage and lifts himself into the tree. The tree doesn't merely shudder this time but quakes, its branches snapping back and forth wildly. The Keeper's voice screeches through Spock's communicator, "What is this? What are you fools doing?!"

"Spock!" Jim wraps an arm around the trunk as the tree tries to shake him off. The mist thickens to a roiling smoke; it flings stones at them with temper.

Jim shouts, "Jump!"

Since Spock has decided not to rationalize where rationality doesn't seem comparable, he jumps. His communicator is screaming, "No! No! No! Get away!"

The moment Spock takes a hold of the lowest branch, some kind of energy, like lightning, runs down the tree; its bark splits open in several places. One of the bigger boughs gives a great crack and thunder rumbles through the crater when it drops. Smaller branches bend or snap when the smoke whips past them as fierce as a hurricane wind. Spock hooks his legs around his branch so he is less likely to be swept away.

The tree quiets quite suddenly. The energy captured at its core dissipates into a handful of white stars. Beyond the tree is nothing, a darkness. They could be suspended somewhere beyond time, or nowhere at all. Spock does not know, nor can guess, until a light begins to blossom like young leaves at the tips of every branch. Then he sees that the Tree has transported them to a new place.

"Jim?" he calls, recalling that he is not alone.

The Captain's voice comes to him from above, not quite steady. "Spock? I'm okay. Are you—?"

"Affirmative." He releases his grip on the tree and drops the short distance to the ground. Jim untangles his body from the tree and carefully descends as well.

"That was—I don't have a word for that, Spock. Where are we?"

"It would seem we are no longer on the mountain, Captain." Indeed, they are on the outskirts of a forest. The tree has already set its roots into the earth; it gives the appearance of having always been there. Maybe it has.

He almost tenses at the snarling from above their heads. The creature, looking wind-blown and very unhappy, crawls out onto a tree limb to fuss at them. "You, you, you! How dare you both! No fare was paid!"

"That was well done," a familiar voice interrupts. Gram appears at the edge of the forest and beckons them to her. "Come."

If at all possible, the creature seems more incensed. "Witch! You foul witch, you've broken the rules!"

"The Tree has no rules to break," Gram replies. "You have always been bound by your own greed, little troll."

"Fool that you are, I would not accept all a Court's riches to be you!" the troll counters, his lip curling in a snarl. His warning to Jim and Spock is: "If you follow this Guide, she will lead you straight into the mouth of a beast."

"She has promised to take us to Doctor McCoy," Spock says, interested in its reaction.

Its laughter is unkind. "Who says the two are not the same thing?" The troll-creature scuttles away, clonking its prized communicator against bark as it goes, and the great tree pulses with light once more. Then the Tree and its Keeper are gone.

~~~

Rowan steps aside to let Leonard pass into the entrance to a canopied hall, dappled within by sunlight and shadow. But voices rising from the forest floor disturb the tranquil atmosphere and cause Leonard to turn back. They are not high so up he cannot see the commotion. Three figures are surrounded by sentinels. Captured? Leonard wonders.

A face, thin and familiar, turns upward and pinpoints him with relative ease. Leonard opens his mouth in surprise to utter a name (Gram? how can she be here? where has she been?) when it is the tall uniformed figure beside her who lifts his face also to peruse the city of trees that rivets Leonard's attention. For an instant, he thinks he is hallucinating. He must be because it's impossible for—

" _Spock?_ "

Leonard starts forward but a hand catches his arm, holding him fast. Rowan ignores McCoy's whip of a command to let him go.

"Doctor, you must follow me to the path's end. I am your Guide." Sunlight glints off Rowan's spectacles, shading the expression in his eyes.

A sly fox had asked Leonard once: _...is he guiding you to his purpose or yours?_

Leonard removes Rowan's hand from his arm with sudden force. "My friend is here. I want to see him."

"You must not," his Guide insists.

The doubt and lethargy which had burdened Leonard since the firebird's song no longer seems to be trouble him. He remembers what he shouldn't have forgotten. "Thank you for taking me this far, Sir Rowan," he says graciously. "I think I can find my own way home now."

There is nothing to be done about Rowan's paled countenance. Leonard cannot take back his words. Leaning out over the vine bridge, which pulls taut under his weight, Leonard cups hands around his mouth and shouts, "Spock! Up here!"

The third figure starts, looks up. It's Jim.

"Jim!" Leonard cries with relief.

Though the others are far away, standing at the foot of city, Leonard sees Jim shape his name. Leonard shivers at the echo; at the same time a muscle in his leg throbs.

Jim says something to Gram and gestures sharply, pointing to McCoy, who must be little more than a madly waving specter of a human in a background of leafy twigs. Spock listens intently to Jim for a moment.

If they cannot come up, he will climb down, Leonard thinks. He turns around to ask Rowan to show him a set of stairs that leads directly to the ground rather than in a complex maze but Rowan is gone. The inquisitive faces who have been watching rheir progress through the city are gone too. Even the playful breeze has vanished.

Leonard is alone.

He starts back the way he came until he reaches the end of a platform. But there are no stairs, only a dizzying drop to the ground. "What the..." _That can't be right._ He remembers the stairs from only moments ago.

An autumn-red leaf delicately brushes against his arm as it comes to rest upon the platform. He bends down to pick it up without knowing why, only to realize as he straightens up that his shadow has doubled.

And it moves of its own accord.

Leonard twists around and is greeted by a lone sentinel. "The Queen requests your presence," McCoy is told.

He shakes his head. "I need to get down there." He points off the side of the platform. "My friends—"

"The intruders will also stand before the Queen."

That sounds ominous, Leonard thinks. "Then I'll wait for them right here."

The sentinel does not disagree. He merely places a hand on Leonard's shoulder, and the world pinwheels in a fast circle of color before disappearing altogether. There is no time for Leonard to cry out.

~~~

"I don’t see Bones. Where did he go?" Jim asks, straining his eyes in vain to search one of the bridges connecting the towering trees. "Spock?"

"Negative, Captain. I can no longer locate him."

Jim rounds on one of the tall guards. "Bring my officer, or take us to him."

They don't seem to be listening. He debates on issuing a more physical demand. They may be tall but they are not built as he is. He may be stronger.

Gram says softly, warningly, "Do not, Captain. They will lead us to where we must be."

"How do you know they won't simply throw us out of the forest?"

Gram answers by saying to one of the guards, "We wish to enter the city."

"You are not welcome here."

"I am welcome nowhere," she agrees without heat, "but I am both guide and guardian. The ceremony begins. It is my right to attend, and I have brought guests. Do you deny us entrance, Sentinel?"

A shadow crosses his face. "I cannot."

Her expression bears no triumph, only a gravity her companions have yet to fully understand. The men move away, and Gram walks to a giant tree. Its roots unfurl into a staircase that disappears around the curve of the tree.

"Do not look back," she tells Jim and Spock. "Do not look down. Speak to no one but McCoy until the question is asked. Otherwise your chance is lost."

Jim wants to know, "What question?"

"The only question you can answer" comes her vague reply. She steps onto the stairs then, and Jim follows her, Spock after him. They are careful to seek for no more explanations. Eyes fixed ahead, they ascend into the city as voiceless spirits walking a path of the shunned or dead. He can feel it now, a teasing red alert at the back of his neck, that they must not err. Gram is right: this is their only chance to save Bones.

~~~

When McCoy comes to, he feels fuzzy and detached, as though he has spent many years separate from his physical self. His feet are planted inside a narrow hall. His temples hurt, and his body is stiff. Gradually he becomes aware that one pants leg is slightly damp. A slow, clumsy inspection (why are his hands so badly coordinated?) reveals sluggish bleeding from his old thigh wound. An injury. How had he forgotten that?

"Doctor McCoy!"

His name. Someone is saying his name, maybe has been saying his name for a long while. Some of Leonard's bewilderment recedes. He glances over his shoulder to find Jim Kirk staring at him near the entrance to the hall, exasperated and clearly worried. He looks like he wants to shake Leonard (or hug him) yet restrains his movement. Or something else restrains him from approaching.

"Bones," Jim asks, gentling his voice, "are you all right?"

 _What a loaded question, Jim_. He croaks, "Y-Yeah." Then, almost absently, "...Spock, why're you frowning like that?"

Apparently it is above a Vulcan's dignity to argue "I do not frown." Sadly, Leonard wishes Spock would, if only so he could be comforted by the rebuttal and be assured he isn't hallucinating after all. To Gram he says nothing because he has no idea what he wants to say to her.

The two sentinels standing guard over Jim, Spock, and Gram break the reunion—and the hall's eerie quietness—by thumping their oaken staffs against the floor. They repeat the action twice more.

A warning or a trumpet's call—Leonard doesn't know what it is meant to be but he understands its purpose. There is a new presence in the hall. _Here_ , a voice whispers in his mind. _Look here._

It is in front of him but he doesn't want to look. He feels afraid to look yet despite his fear cannot resist. _She_ wants him to acknowledge her.

A hauntingly lovely woman of indeterminate age sits upon a throne of twisted roots, her hands lax against its curved, earth-dark wood and her expression unchanging. She is a Queen to all; she needs no other name to wield her power. The two sentinels come forward to kneel before her in reverence before blending back into one dark, obscure mass along the hall.

She is waiting for Leonard to approach her. He goes without meaning to, drawn by the tether of a silent command. There is no other sound to disguise the echo of his footsteps across the roughly hewn floor of a tree's inner belly. Vaguely he is aware that Jim, Spock, and Gram follow. Gram does not seem bound by the force that binds Jim and Spock, but she comes no closer to the throne than where Leonard stands.

Crowned with oak leaves and roses, the Queen gracefully bends her slender neck as she considers the odd pairing they present. Under her stare, Leonard envisions himself clinging to rock, a moon shadow ready to be flung to the earth by an impervious watchtower. He can almost feel the press of cold stone against his face and wind tugging at his hair. Telling him to let go, to fall.

At a surreptitious brush of Gram's fingertips against his palm, Leonard starts and the dream dispels. His vision shifts then, cutting through the deceptive light around the Queen, and his lips part in surprise. The roses in her crown are black, not a lush red; the leaves brittle and withered. Her hair is a silvery veil of cobwebs, and her eyes are storm-gray.

She is still beautiful but also terrifying.

Whatever he might have said about his vision becomes lost when the Queen speaks. Her voice imitates an icicle, dripping words like cold water. "Tithe-payer, welcome to my Court."

Leonard can never forget his manners, which were instilled in him at a young age. His nod is perfunctory but respectful. Finding his voice is more of a struggle. "Ma'am, I am Leonard McCoy."

He does not need to see her 'Court' to know others are present. The hall does not seem to adhere to its outer dimensions, giving the impression of tired galleries full of movement. Moments ago, Leonard had thought he had seen a figure dressed in attire similar to Rowan's but the glimpse was like a barely visible reflection in a dark glass. He had stopped himself from calling out, somehow knowing that Rowan won't—or cannot—acknowledge him now.

The sudden hush of the hall becomes fingers walking the length of McCoy's spine.

The Queen asks, "Have you come of your free will?"

What reason is there to lie? No one had forced him to follow Gram, then Rowan, though at times he had felt he hadn't a choice in the matter. "Yes."

"Do you accept the full price of the tithe?" The words are smooth and sepulchral, born of a tradition which has outlived stars. He senses her words spinning a web about him, but he is helpless to stop it. She, the spider at the heart of that nebulous netting, is waiting patiently for him to be caught and cocooned.

Leonard tries to put distance between them but he suddenly finds his body is physically incapable of the slightest of movements. "What tithe?" he chokes, but the knowledge is there: the colonists giving him to the desert—to Them. Her.

No one heeds the question.

 _Who pays the tithe if I do not?_ the doctor asks himself. A memory haunts him, birch trees with youthful eyes.

Why does yes seem like the only answer to give? But it is. He whispers it. The web still ensnares it.

The Queen is silent, gathering power. There comes a final question, one he could not have anticipated: "Is there one who can claim you?"

Leonard is silenced by an invisible hand. This question is not meant for him. The spider doubles her web's strands, weightless but effectively binding. He still has a chance to escape them, Leonard knows, but he cannot speak.

The voice of a friend rings clearly through the hall, Jim in Leonard's defense. "I claim Leonard McCoy." Spock lends strength to the pronouncement with " _We_ claim Leonard McCoy."

The spider, the Queen, stops her weaving. Leonard stumbles free, almost crumpling at the sudden freedom but catches himself with a hand on Gram's shoulder. She does not refuse him help.

"I can…" Dare he ask? Dare he believe it? "I can go home?"

" _No._ " The denial is razor-sharp, a blade cutting through flesh to bone. The Queen binds them all in a grander web than one meant for a single man. "No, a claim must be proven. He—" She lifts a thin, delicate hand and points at Kirk. "—must pass a test of blood and bone." Now she points to Spock. "This one must earn the firebird's magic and you, tithe-payer," Leonard straightens and turns to face her again, unwilling to appear weak, "will show us where your true heart lies."

"Accepted," Jim says without batting an eye.

Leonard and Spock stare at him. Leonard opens and closes his mouth. "Jim..."

"I had to climb a mountain to get here," Jim says. "There's no point in turning back now."

"Oh god," Leonard says succinctly.

Gram smiles at him, the first broad smile he has ever seen on her face. Her teeth are definitely pointed. He doesn't know if she is wishing them good luck or is just overly pleased about something. He decides not to ask.

Spock folds his hands behind his back and cuts into Leonard's jumbled thoughts. "Doctor McCoy, when I agreed to support your request, I did not anticipate your involvement in such an unusual predicament."

His shoulders slouch out of pure, rebellious habit. "You pointy—never mind. If you're implyin' this is my fault, I'm going to kick you."

"Bones, I think he means to say he's sorry."

"Then for God's sake, he should just say the two words _I'm sorry!_ "

Spock argues coolly, "That is one word and a conjunction."

Leonard rocks back on his heels. "Did you climb a mountain too?" he asks the Vulcan.

"Affirmative."

"Well by God it's a miracle you didn't fall off of it!"

And suddenly Leonard feels immensely better. The Queen, however, has no more tolerance for mortal bantering. She sends her sentinels to kick Jim, Spock, and McCoy out of the hall. Gram offers advice to them as they are herded away.

After navigating a bridge, Leonard asks, "Did she say what I think she said?"

Jim examines the end of a platform with a grim eye. "Yes."

"But what does that mean, 'jump'?"

Jim rubs at the back of his neck. "It means we won't be lucky enough to find stairs, Bones. So we jump."

"What!" Leonard squeaks, but sadly he has no time to protest further.

Jim jumps off the platform like it isn't the craziest thing to do in the world and Spock (" _let go, you green-blooded bastard!_ " McCoy yells) follows shortly thereafter, taking Leonard with him.

They nimbly land on the ground and, glancing back, discover the forest city is not even a vague speck on the horizon. A beach dune looms over them. Leonard stares down at the sand covering his boots.

"Fascinating," Spock says.

For once Leonard has no urge to disagree.


	2. A Quest for Three

Leonard settles on the beach and lays an arm across his knees. There is a moment where it seems Jim is going to tell him this isn't the time to be sitting down, but the man's expression quickly softens with understanding. After another cursory view of the area, Jim skates down the sand dune he had previously climbed and goes to McCoy's side. His questioning "Bones?" is quiet, a touch concerned.

"Just tired, Jim." Leonard glances up at Kirk, his smile faintly sardonic. "I'm also tryin' to figure out if you 'n Spock being here is a good thing or a bad thing."

 _And real._ He doesn't mention that part. There is no point in offending them, illusions or not.

"It's a good thing," Jim says with his usual confidence.

"Of course," McCoy mutters. A sigh builds in his chest, born of both exasperation and acceptance. He fights it down. His fingers idly sift through sand. "So...did you come on your own, or did the colonists boot you and Spock out into the desert too?"

"On our own. We were searching for you when a woman offered to help." Jim folds his arms and frowns, eyes fixed ahead. "There's a body in the desert that looks a lot like you, Bones."

It isn't Jim’s jump between subjects which startles Leonard so much as it is what subject the man jumps to. Leonard's brain stutters over it. "What are you saying?"

"Doctor," Spock interrupts, no doubt aware that Leonard may be leaping to illogical conclusions, "the Captain's statement—"

Is that a hint of disapproval in the Vulcan's voice?

"—is not a fact."

Jim's mouth twitches with amused resignation. He remains silent.

Spock continues, "The body was not human; therefore it is unlikely it was yours."

"I'm kind of _in_ my body right now, Spock" is Leonard's dry response. He pinches his arm for reassurance, only to find himself more disturbed.

 _You've passed from the earthly realm to this one_ —part of what Sir Rowan had said comes barreling back to him. Could this be an out-of-body experience? Or maybe his wandering spirit has fallen down some sort of Alice in Wonderland-like rabbit hole. No. For once it's better to be practical like Spock.

"Gram said it was meant as a trick," Jim offers, perhaps seeing uncertainty waver in Leonard's expression.

McCoy lets out an explosive sigh. "You know what? Dead bodies that may or may not look like me are off the list of conversation topics until further notice. I think we've got enough to worry about without mulling over that one." Leonard stands up, brushing at the sand clinging to his clothes. He looks between Spock and Kirk. "Somebody pick a direction."

Jim and Spock share a look, communicating without words.

Leonard tells them after a few seconds pass, "It's not going to matter. If there's one thing I have learned while I've been here, we won't need to find what we're looking for. It'll find us."

"That's not comforting, Bones."

"It wasn't meant to be."

In the end, they decide to walk along the beach with the wind at their backs. That way, no matter where they're traveling, at least the sand isn't blowing in their faces. Leonard remarks how heartily sick of sand he is. Jim's hand lands on his shoulder, warm and solid, and gives it a friendly squeeze in agreement. Spock points out that the planet's red desert sand and this almost pristine white beach sand are likely not of the same composition (" _note the unusual reflective properties of the gradient, Doctor_ "), and Leonard is immediately reminded of how much Spock likes to hear himself talk. But rather than rolling his eyes heavenward, Leonard smiles.

So, he decides, these two must be his real friends. That is a comfort he hadn't expected once Gram left him at the Hall. He had had the sneaking suspicion then he would spend the rest of his life—or an eternity—wandering a strange land. Yet here Jim and Spock are.

He might make it home after all.

~~~

The Queen had sent them on a quest, undoubtedly of the dangerous kind, so it doesn't surprise Leonard when nature turns against them. The wind switches direction almost immediately and picks up speed until smoke-like eddies of sand are snaking across the beach, stinging every inch of their exposed skin. They stop walking and turn around to shield themselves.

"What now?" Leonard shouts over the wind.

Jim points to the border of sand dunes in an unspoken command. Time to leave the beach.

That, it seems, is exactly what they _shouldn't_ do. The wind speed doubles, ripping at their clothes and hair. With a curse that is partly words and partly sand, Leonard grabs onto Spock's arm. Jim anchors him from the other side with a tight grip upon his wrist. But the closer they trudge doggedly toward the dunes, the more difficult it is to stay on their feet. At last, Leonard tugs sharply on both of his companions.

"Down!" he shouts, crouching. "Down!"

The malevolent wind eases into a playful breeze the moment their knees make contact with the beach.

Leonard coughs and spits sand out of his mouth. He is afraid to touch his eyes with his hands. Above them, the wind carries a murmur, water speaking as its delicate froth laces the shore. Leonard refuses to look up, to heed the voice, and concentrates on the hollow claw of a crab poking through the sand. It is decorated by a long crack from whatever had drilled into its hard shell. He doesn't touch it.

"Maybe we're supposed to head south," Jim is saying.

"I'm not goin' in the water," Leonard counters, shaking sand from his shirt sleeves.

They look at him strangely, as if he had spat something out, an inarticulate thing, a fish scale.

Jim promises, "Nobody is going in the water."

He rubs wearily at his cheek and allows his gaze to track the crest of a wave over Spock's shoulder. "Then how do we keep something from coming out?"

They all see it: the giant, dark head lifting free from the water before retreating beneath the rolling waves again. Its face was mostly obscured, except for green-gold scales glittering under the sun and long, trailing seaweed whiskers from a short snout. It's too far away to tell about teeth.

"South," the Captain states more firmly. "We're definitely going south."

No one disagrees because not one of them has the urge to linger and meet a sea monster. With their luck, Leonard thinks, it wouldn't simply be a sea monster, but a hungry one at that. The selkie in the river was frightening enough. What terrifying things could exist in an otherworldy ocean?

Jim helps Leonard to his feet. Spock abandons staring out across the ocean, his face emptied of expression, and stands. Herded by seen and unseen obstacles from the other directions, the three men begin the journey south.

~~~

Leonard listens to the quiet singing of the sea as he walks. He might have been alone and the world beginning itself all over again but for Captain James T. Kirk and First Officer Spock keeping pace at his side. They do not speak to one another, not until a shape rises from the dunes as a wavering silhouette against the orange sun. Leonard shades his eyes to look at it. A small house, or smaller perhaps. A hut, slightly sunken into the sandy earth on one side.

For some unknown reason, Leonard's heart closes like a fist in his chest. His first word is barely a whisper, as though his voice has suffered years of disuse. "W-We could keep walking."

Jim studies the outline of the sagging hut through narrowed eyes as they approach it from the right. "You said the path finds us, Bones. We should have seen this place from farther away but didn't. It appeared for a reason."

"You can't pay attention to half the things I say, Jim," Leonard argues weakly. "I might be crazy from dehydration." _Heck, I might be dead._

"Spock?" Jim asks for their third companion's opinion.

"While I find merit in Doctor McCoy's statement, I must agree with you, Captain. We should investigate."

Leonard eyes the Vulcan sourly. "In exactly what part of my statement did you find merit, Mr. Spock? The suggestion of avoiding trouble, or when I said I might be crazy?"

Spock's posture speaks plainly enough: _need you ask?_

Leonard calls him an unpleasant word under his breath. Jim, ignoring them both, turns sharply and heads for the hut. The wind doesn't fight the decision. Leonard calls it an unpleasant word too.

The hut looks like a gnarled tree growing alone among gentle hillocks. Along its face, a small wind chime made from bird bones, feathers, and seashells stirs gently. The hut's door is ajar. Jim gives it a push with his boot. From the threshold, nothing can be seen. The interior is cloaked in darkness.

Leonard peers at the darkness, looking for an inkling of a presence within. "No one's home."

"Or the structure is un-inhabited," Spock adds. As if on cue, a mouse, tiny and grey, scurries around the corner of the door, squeaking indignantly at them, and heads for the swaying grass which crowns the dune.

Leonard grimaces. "Except by rodents. Wonderful."

"Keep the door open. I'll look for a light," Jim says and disappears inside the hut. Spock slips between Leonard and the door and follows the captain.

McCoy huffs, thinking _isn't this always the way?_ Well, he's not going to be left standing outside like a fool! He swings the door as far back as it will go. It droops against the wall of the hut like it doesn't intend to move anytime soon. For good measure, Leonard finds a heavy rock for a doorstop. Satisfied, he enters the hut, fully expecting to bump into someone within the crowded space in short order.

But there is no one.

"Jim? Spock?" The names echo.

A spidery sensation crawls down Leonard's spine.

A light flares to life in the darkness, far away though the hut is not very deep. The small flame soon breeds other flames. Only when they begin to elongate does the darkness reveal another shape, round and glowing metal-hot. Leonard's eyes adjust to the dim light and widen with realization. The flames are licking sullenly at the bottom of a pot, and that pot—

But the rest is encased in an inky blackness. The pot, only its lower half visible, seems to hover eerily in the air.

"Hello?"

There comes a sound, flint to stone. Sparks are born and given to the wick of one candle after another. Leonard, seeing the illumination of the curve of a face, backs toward the door and the brightness beyond it that signifies the outside world. His foot stumbles over something on the floor, a thing which makes an unhappy noise, and Leonard turns to flee. Instantly, the door to the hut flies shut. He reaches for the doorknob but it disappears beneath his hand.

Someone chuckles, the sound husky with age, amusement and mayhap a hint of cruelty. "Leaving so soon," a voice muses, "when you've not stayed for dinner?"

Leonard, fearing both to turn around and to stay blind to attack, chooses to face the guest in the hut with him. The room is now visible by hundreds of dots of candlelight that seem to recede beyond human perception. The floor is packed dirt and the walls are a patchwork of uneven stones. At the center of the room sits a cauldron above a pit of fire. Steam dances into the air, but there is no smell of whatever is cooking. Something clucks and Leonard looks down, startled to find a white chicken pecking the ground near his feet.

"Lovely, isn't she?"

The voice belongs to a woman seated in a rocking chair made from the bones of some large animal. At first glance she is too old to be threatening. But as he watches, her figure sharpens into a perverse parody of the firebird. Her fingers end in golden talons, which she is using like knitting needles to make a garment or a tapestry. Rather than hair, a plumage of dark-red feathers sprouts from her head. Her eyes are wide-set and maliciously black, not beguiling.

"My hen—don't you think she's lovely?" The woman's voice, when she speaks, is a jarring squawk.

The aforementioned hen raps Leonard's boot with her beak before waddling past him.

Leonard folds his arms (mainly to hide the shaking of his hands) and tries to exude the aura of an annoyed Jim. "What have you done with my friends?"

She blinks owlishly at him. "Friends?" Her mouth pursues in dismay. "There are more of you? What right do you have to intrude in my home!"

On any other day, Leonard would be apologetic. But since he came to this world, he has endured his share of tricks. "Ma'am, I will gladly leave if you put the knob back on the door."

She cackles delightedly. "That's not my doing. Magic brought you here and only magic will release you." Putting aside her knitting, she goes to her cauldron. "I suppose I ought to ask you what you came for."

"My—"

She waves away his response before he can voice it. "Come here. What is it that you see?"

When he doesn't immediately obey, she snaps, irritated, "Or don't! The door will stay shut and eventually I'll grow tired of bantering with you. Then you'll be _in_ the pot instead of outside it!" She mutters madly for a moment, finishing with "The _tastiest_ bones have magic in them."

That propels him forward. When Leonard looks at the murky liquid filling the cauldron he sees a reflection of himself. Except it isn't a true reflection. He has strange eyes, both blue, yet one as though he saw out of day and the other out of twilight.

"I don't understand. That can't be me." The surprised words fall from his mouth, settling like embers to smolder in the muck. The liquid accepts them greedily. He pulls back from the pot's edge in alarm.

"What do you search for?" the woman asks him.

"Nothing," he almost says. Instead, "My friends."

She clucks chidingly. "They are not lost. They have never left you."

He looks around, half-expecting to see Jim and Spock standing behind him. "But..."

"What do you search for? A beginning? Many men have come here seeking their beginning, only to realize it will always be ahead of them, always shifting back."

Her riddling hurts his head. "I know my beginning."

The woman's wide mouth stretches in a smile with a glint of teeth. "How fortunate for you." Her eyes cut to the cauldron. A bubble of air swells the liquid until it pops with a wet belch. "Your ending, then?"

He doesn't have to think about it. "No thanks."

"I haven't all the time in the world!" she snaps. "What is it you want to know? No, never mind that. I'll make it simpler: what do you need?"

He stares at her.

"A spell? A sword to slay a dragon? A story?" She snorts like that would be the last thing she would willingly provide.

He releases a cry of frustration. "How would I know what I need? I didn't even ask to come to this damn place!"

The woman eyes him from the opposite side of the cauldron. "Ah," she murmurs knowingly, "a tithe-payer. So it's your heart."

For a brief, confused moment there is an echo of a different voice in her words, a voice which could melt mountains with ribbons of fiery song. Leonard reasons he must have imagined it after the echo is gone. He presses his fingers against his breastbone anxiously. His heart? That makes no sense. He hasn't lost his heart. It's in his chest, where he hopes it will stay.

"I have plenty of those," the woman is saying as she shuffles over to a basket, "but I don't remember collecting yours." He is appalled when she lifts a heart out of the basket and inspects it. "No, not this one." The rejected heart is summarily flung into the pit of fire beneath the cauldron. First it bursts into a handful of red stars then melts into a hard, black stone.

Another heart goes into the fire. Then a third. "Of those who give their hearts to me, few come back for them. Enough of this!" She overturns the basket with a kick. "There are too many. Choose one that suits you." The woman returns to her rocking chair, lifting her white hen into her lap so she can pet it.

Leonard kneels on the floor and gingerly picks up the scattered hearts one by one and places them back into the basket. "A heart is a precious thing," Leonard tells her with reproach coloring his voice. "You can't treat these so carelessly."

"They're not mine."

"It doesn't matter if they aren't yours. A man will die without his heart. This," he says, lifting one up for her to see, "is somebody's chance at life."

The hen is put aside for the partially knitted garment. Her talons click against each other as she loops thick yarn of wool around them. "You speak with the respect of one who knows hearts."

"I know their value to the body. I'm a doctor."

"Ah-ha. And what is another use for a heart besides to live and to feed upon?"

He isn't certain how to answer that question. "If you're talking metaphorically, I have loved—and do love—some people with all of my heart."

"But you don't love everyone."

"Do you?" he counters.

Her cackle is pleased. "I might not put you in the pot so soon, doctor—you who has the gall to argue with a witch who would eat you!"

Leonard sighs. "I'm stuck here, aren't I?"

"Mm, perhaps not. Answer this last question, and it could free you."

He cannot see the harm in answering another question. "Ask."

She rocks slowly in her bone chair, her weaving forgotten. "What is a heart's worth?"

"It depends on how you would use the heart. But even when you're not using it," Leonard insists, thinking of how carelessly she threw them into the fire, "you can't simply pretend it's worthless."

The candle lights gutter, ebb, and begin to vanish one at a time. "Wise words. I hope you remember them," the witch tells McCoy as darkness, born anew, slowly consumes her house. "Otherwise you shall never discover where your heart lies. You will have forgotten you have one."

"Wait, you can't leave—how do I get out of here?"

"The door, obviously," she says, amused, and vanishes.

The hut returns to being a hut, dark and empty except for Leonard. He stretches out his hands, encounters a wall, and follows it to the door. Its knob twists compliantly under his hand and the door creaks open. Sunlight momentarily blinds him.

"Bones!"

"Jim?"

Kirk grips his shoulders. "Thank God. We were beginning to think you weren't coming back."

"I wasn't—" He turns to stare at the hut. "I went in after you and Spock..."

"And found yourself alone," Jim finishes grimly. "I know. The same thing happened to us."

"What!"

Jim tells him about walking into the hut and becoming trapped in there until out of nowhere somebody—a man with hair cropped short and neat as a fox's pelt beneath a crown—raised a lantern and asked him what he thought he was doing wandering around in the dark like a fool.

"For a minute, I thought you were playing a trick on me, Bones."

"Who was he?"

Jim shakes his head. "I have no idea. He handed me the lantern and bade me follow him. The farther we walked, the younger he became. He said he was a prince who made an unfortunate choice and now he was in exile. I think he meant to advise me. The experience was strange, but eventually he led me back to the door."

"That's it?" Leonard says incredulously. "You had an innocuous conversation with a crowned prince?"

"Fascinating." Spock joins in. "I was approached by a scholar. We agreed to an exchange of tales since we both sought knowledge. I offered a story I learned during my early tutelage of Surak's ideals, which I believe she transcribed in a book as I related it. She shared the firebird's story." At Jim's curious look, Spock adds delicately, "Forgive me, I was warned not to repeat it."

Leonard looks nonplussed. "Why am I the only one who got a chicken lady that wanted to cook my bones?"

Sadly, neither Jim nor Spock has an answer for him.

~~~

After skirting the dunes and returning to the beach, they debate on which direction to take. Strangely, the sun is dipping toward the horizon though they haven't spent hours inside the hut. The ocean is a liquid gold, rolling gently with calm waves. Overhead, a bird with a long wingspan drops in altitude to skim the surface of the water, probably hunting for fish.

"It feels like we're back where we started," Leonard says, shivering as a breeze tugs at his torn shirt sleeve. The wind was warm earlier. Now it carries a chill, both in temperature and the way it whistles, like the sound made from a pipe of hollow bone.

Spock looks inland. "Our movements may no longer be restricted to the beach. If we must wait through a night, it would be best not to endure it so plainly in the open."

"Yeah, I don't see the point in hanging around here either," Leonard agrees. "We should—Jim?" Jim's shoulders are tense. Because the man is facing away, Leonard cannot see his expression. "What's the matter?"

Leonard and Spock turn around as one, and Leonard immediately regrets having done so. The sea monster is no longer in the sea but lumbering along the beach towards them. Its great, heaving breaths send up pockets of sand. The air suddenly has a stench of swamp rot.

Leonard finds it difficult to tell if the beast looks friendly or not. And he remembers that in his many interesting years as CMO of the _Enterprise_ , he hasn't met a single creature of that size whose interest in them didn't amount to categorizing them as a bellyful of dinner.

Jim is remarkably still in Leonard's opinion. "Jim."

Kirk's hands slowly form into fists. Spock remarks sharply, "We do not have weapons."

"Jim, did you hear that?" Leonard presses. "We have _no weapons._ "

"I heard you."

But Kirk is considering the beast with a look McCoy recognizes too well. A bad feeling sinks the doctor's stomach to his feet.

"This might be my test," Jim tells no one in particular, almost dismissively. His voice doesn't waver once; his eyes do not blink.

Leonard curses Jim Kirk's insanity. Of all the times, why did it have to flare up now? Jim might as well announce to the world—and to the Queen, who undoubtedly has spies watching them—he wants to do battle with a seven-headed serpent. Leonard glances at Spock's lean, composed face to confirm they are thinking the same thing. Then he grabs one of Jim's arms; Spock takes the other arm.

Increasing from a lumber to a trot, the sea monster looses a low bellow and shakes its enormous head like a bull preparing to charge.

"We're running" is all that McCoy says.

Somehow that startles Jim out of his daze. "What? Running?"

As if it heard that, the sea monster's trot suddenly switches to an earth-rattling gallop. And run they do, all of them—Jim, Spock, Leonard, and the sea monster.


	3. Where a Tale Begins

_"Does Doctor McCoy seem different to you?"_

_The question, coming from Jim, Spock supposed, was not an idle one. He gave a careful answer. "The doctor's mannerisms do not seem affected." Indeed, Leonard McCoy remained the same, somewhat brash man Spock knew him as; but there was one notable oddity. "However his responses do lack his usual..." A word came to him and he considered for it half of a second before voicing it. "...passion."_

_Jim frowned thoughtfully. "Yes, that's almost it, Spock. Almost—but not quite. I don't know..." the man said as he turned slightly away from the hut to face Spock, "maybe we're inventing trouble where there is none."_

_"Jim, I suspect the only way we can help Doctor McCoy is by hastening his return to the ship. The influence here is strong." He knew he didn't need to specify what kind of influence he meant. Jim would understand him._

_Kirk smiled slightly. "I'm afraid that may be more difficult than we imagined, Mr. Spock." He looked as though he wanted to say more, but at that moment the door to the hut swung open and Leonard McCoy stepped into daylight. "Bones!" the Captain cried._

_Spock perused the doctor's face, saw nothing amiss, and tucked away his apprehension. Until it became apparent what was different about McCoy, Spock saw no reason in upsetting the already delicate balance of trust they had to preserve. If that became compromised, not only would Leonard be lost to this world but likely he and Jim would be as well._

~~~

Whatever temporary insanity had stolen Jim Kirk clearly fled when the sea monster began to barrel toward them, flinging sand about wildly as it careened down the beach. With its streaming seaweed whiskers, big jaws and jarring, hearty bellows, the sight of the beast was enough to break any spell. Now Jim yells at Leonard to run faster. If there was a moment to catch his breath, Leonard would yell back, "Why thanks, Captain Obvious!" As it is, his temper is warring ferociously with his fear at being chased by a creature the size of house. For a second, he imagines himself turning on the sea monster and giving it a fierce kick in the shin. Or the flipper. Or whatever appendage it has. Leonard is much too old to lob back and forth between mad rushes of adrenaline like an abused toy ball.

Though he doesn't opt for bravery (or brave stupidity), McCoy's feet, being of a mind apart from his common sense, tangle themselves up and cause him to pitch forward and plant his face on the beach. Spock, of course, is dim-witted enough to came back and pluck him out of the sand like a shell.

"Don't even think about it!" Leonard snaps. "I'm capable of keeping up!"

"I had no intention of carrying you, Doctor," Spock says, voice flat from exertion. His long fingers encase Leonard's wrist, and he drags Leonard into a run again. Jim, as they come level with him, looks torn between incensed and resigned that they would waste precious seconds to have an argument while a monster loped after them.

The doctor shouts, "Don't gawk, Jim—RUN FASTER!"

It was evil of him to say, he knows, and he shouldn't be so immensely pleased with himself. But damn if it didn't feel good to toss that back in his friend's face! Now, Leonard thinks, if he could just get this stubborn Vulcan to let go of his arm...

It doesn't occur to Leonard then that this sudden burst of feeling in his chest is not normal. That it is hard and somewhat obliquely self-righteous—and also a tiny seed, having planted itself where it doesn't belong in order to grow. He couldn't know that because he dismisses it as the frustration he has carried around for too long. In truth, what blooms is not frustration at all. Nor is it to be short-lived.

But Leonard is running, not thinking.

The beast, however, begins to slow down, almost contemplatively. At last, satisfied for its own reasons, it eases into a trot, then an idle walk. It roars once, a rumble of sea sounds, before falling silent. The echo chases after Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

Only when the three men realize they are no longer being pursued does the inevitable happen: the ground opens up a great, gaping maw and swallows them whole. The sea monster watches, fascinated, as arms, legs, and screams are devoured by an onslaught of sand. Moments later, the beach returns into its smooth white plain, whatever deceptive nature it may have masked by the serene lull of waves breaking against the shore. With a tolerant huff, the sea monster turns around and begins to lumber back the way it came.

~~~

McCoy sinks into the earth only to end up at the top of the world. When he opens his eyes to an unexpected sound—a song, sweet and clear, but cold like water rather than made of flames—the shadow darkening the back of his eyelids disappears and the world grows very quiet, very still. Above him are endless arches of wood. The rafters of a roof, he thinks murkily.

Someone shifts along one of rafters, perched there, and watches him through eyes the color of violets. Unbidden, a memory rises in Leonard's head, not his own, of a cluster of frightened, young faces. A horn trumpets distantly in a forest of dead foliage and bones, and the children press hands to their mouths, turning into wordless trees. 

The memory is ghastly. Leonard wants to bury it in the depths of stone where it will be dormant, mute. Instead he closes his eyes and waits for the world to refashion itself into something more palatable. He hasn't the courage to face it until then.

High above him, the violet-eyed creature sighs noiselessly.

~~~

"Doctor."

"Doctor McCoy."

Flesh against flesh—the gentle press of fingers warms the side of his neck.

" _Leonard_." A command to open his eyes. 

Leonard does, blinking against light and a headache blossoming at his temples.

The face in his line of vision asks, "Who am I?"

Leonard's mouth is gritty and dry, tastes of salt. "Spock, First Officer and Science Officer of the Enterprise," he says before adding quickly, "and I'm Leonard" to answer the second, unspoken question. He lifts up his head and tries to look around. Spock, hovering as close as he is, blocks the view of all but a greyish stone wall. "Where's Jim?"

"The Captain is not yet awake."

Leonard slides into an upright position. Sure enough, Jim is laid out on the sun-warmed floor at his side. Leonard reaches for the man's wrist, cursing the fact he doesn't have a medical tricorder. After measuring the pulse, he checks Jim's eyes. "How long has he been out?" Good heart-rate, he thinks, no unusual dilation of the pupils, restful breathing pattern.

"Since I awoke—approximately seven point six-two minutes. The amount of time which passed before that event is indeterminate."

"Okay, fine, it was a stupid question," Leonard says without heat. He gently slaps Jim's cheek, calling the man's name. Kirk's face twitches in response. "Time to wake up, sleeping beauty." 

Nothing. James T. Kirk always has been the stubborn-est man alive. 

Exasperated now, Leonard raises his voice a notch. "Damn it, Jim! We don't have all day!"

"Doctor." 

He ignores the Vulcan's one-word reprimand.

Jim, though, finally opens his eyes. "Bones?"

"No laying about, Captain. It's time to figure out where we've gotten to."

Jim sits up, touching his face as if he is surprised to find it isn't covered in sand. His hand drops back to his lap. "We're alive."

"Seems so," Leonard mumbles, standing up.

They are in a large, round room. It looks like it belongs to someone, though there are no signs of clothing or personal belongings. But he can't imagine how someone would get in here because he can see no door, only small rectangular windows set into the stone wall. Maybe they fly in, Leonard thinks. He glances upward, sees rafters, and his body shivers. There is a dream floating in the back of his mind, but it is already too wispy to recall. 

A movement on the opposite side of the room, a slinking shadow that transforms into a figure as insubstantial as air, catches his attention. He watches it for a minute before realizing Jim and Spock, who are also taking in their new surroundings, have not noticed the presence. So Leonard turns his back to the small creature, saying, "I think this is better than the beach."

Spock's gaze is measuring. "We are trapped in a tower, Doctor."

"Let me rephrase, Spock: I think this is better than suffocating from sand in my lungs or getting stomped on by a sea dragon."

"I find your humor inappropriate."

"Well I find your lack of humor depressing."

" _Enough_ , both of you," Jim interrupts. "I want helpful suggestions or observations, not childish taunts."

"Aye-aye, Captain," Leonard responds sourly. He folds his arms and focuses his attention elsewhere. 

A silent Spock clasps his hands behind his back and takes a turn about the room to catalogue and pontificate. After the sting to Leonard's pride has lessened somewhat, he wanders after the Vulcan. He is still digging around for proper, apologetic words when Spock pauses in his circuit. They look at one another for a brief moment, saying nothing. Then Spock begins to move again, at a slower pace to suit McCoy. Relieved, Leonard releases a soft breath. At least he and Spock have one thing in common: they both prefer wordless apologies when they can get away with them.

As they walk, Leonard's eyes skip across the room, float past the creature as if it is a thing too familiar to bother naming. "Spock," he says to the Vulcan at his elbow, "where do you suppose we are?"

Jim has wandered away to one of the narrow windows angling upward along a wall like a set of stairs. There he surveys a picturesque bird's eye view of trees and snow-capped mountains. Leonard wouldn't be surprised if Jim is disturbed by the lack of seascape, especially since they had been so near the ocean only moments ago.

Spock removes his attention from an oddment, a mounted boar's head, adorning the wall. His answer is slow and thoughtful. "I cannot suppose much, Doctor. The most rudimentary of navigation skills and geographical disciplines do not seem relevant in this world."

"Nor is time," Leonard mutters. Time has become a being all its own, and quite mischievous too. He has long since given up trying to determine how many minutes or hours or days pass from one moment to the next.

"Bones," Jim calls.

The creature plucks that single word from the air and cradles the warm glow of it. Leonard bites down on his bottom lip and pretends not to notice the scavenging of his name. He joins Jim at the window, followed closely by Spock. Together they watch a tiny winged shape dance across the treetops.

"There's a story I'm reminded of," Jim says, brows pinched in concentration. "I can't... remember it that well but..." He briefly presses his mouth into a thin line. "How high up would you say we are?"

"Considering I can see above the clouds, Jim, higher than I'd like to be."

Spock's silence might mean he is attempting to extrapolate their distance from the ground. Leonard doesn't know.

"A home in the clouds," Jim murmurs. "Who would live here?"

Leonard frowns.

"Much of Ardana prefers floating cities," Spock points out.

"Of course the entirety of Ardana wants to live in the sky, Spock, but not everybody is considered privileged enough to step foot in a city like Stratos," Leonard counters, thinking of thousands and thousands of Troglytes dying in the planet's mines each year. He wishes they could have done more for Ardana's minority, but it has never been their place to force societies to live peacefully and respectfully with one another, only act as intergalactic role models and hope others have the good sense to follow their example.

Jim's response is interrupted by a rumble of the floor beneath their feet. Leonard hears the words within the quake of the stonework, and his heart sinks. Once, he had read his daughter a bedtime story with those same words. 

The floor rumbles again. The curious creature holding Leonard's name shrinks in fear and slinks away into a shadowed corner to hide.

 _Fee._ _Fi._ _Fo._ _Fum,_ shakes the room's ceiling and walls.

"Jim," Leonard says, dry-mouthed, "did that story by chance involve a beanstalk?"

"Jack and the Beanstalk!" Jim exclaims. "Jack climbed the beanstalk and encountered a—" Jim's sentence breaks off.

Of the three of them, Spock is the only one who doesn't suddenly look sick to his stomach.

"I vote we let Spock handle this one," Leonard says, hands not quite trembling. The glass in the windows rattles ominously at their backs.

Jim is already searching for a weapon. "Spock, do you see an exit?"

"Negative, Captain."

Leonard puts a hand over his eyes, wondering if he too can slink into a shadowed corner and disappear. When he drops his hand, Jim is holding a broom. An unexpected laugh bursts out of McCoy. "Jim the Giant-Killer," he half-giggles, half-sobs. 

One of Spock's eyebrows angles sharply at the word _giant-killer_. 

Leonard punches down a fit of panic and gives the Vulcan a shaky but brilliant grin. "I guess this is what y'all get for coming after me."

Oddly, Spock looks away. "Do you believe we would have acted otherwise had we known the nature of the peril involved?"

_Do you think we could have left you behind?_

Sobering, Leonard shakes his head. "No," he says, his voice both grateful and firm. "No, I don't, Spock."

The Vulcan glances at him. Relief is unmistakable in the Vulcan's eyes but Leonard says nothing of it. If they're going to die, he figures they both would rather do it without an awkward embarrassment coloring their last few seconds of life.

"Spock! Bones!" Jim hisses as an overly large door winks into existence at the opposite end of the room. 

They crowd in on either side of Kirk, and the door begins to open, a foul-smelling chant of words pouring forth from the other side: " _Fee-fi-fo-fum_..." 

A non-descript, black-haired man with a tall, slightly stooped frame steps into the room; he is dwarfed by the grand doorway. "Fee-fi-fo-fum," he repeats to them, "I smell the blood of a Vulcan." 

Suddenly, Leonard is chuckling. "No offense, but you've got the rhyme wrong. It's 'Englishman'. You smell the blood of an Englishman, not a _Vulcan_."

There is silence, followed by the unblinking intensity of the man's regard. An image comes to Leonard's mind of a dark, crook-necked bird, the kind that is given to waiting in a nearby tree when it scents someone dying. 

Yet the person facing them, looking human, is not very impressive. When he speaks, his voice is a mere shadow of the powerful one that had come out of the dark opening beyond the door. "How do you know what I smell, little man?"

"Little?" Leonard scoffs. "You're not much bigger than we are!"

"Bones..." Jim sounds pained.

"There's your scary giant, Jim. I think you can put the broom down now."

"I could eat your bones."

Leonard lifts an eyebrow at the threat. "I'll have you know you aren't the first to say that to me today."

The man's stooped shoulders draw downwards; he seems diminished. "Then you are not afraid of me?"

Leonard glances at Jim and Spock. "Should we be?"

"Yes."

Studying the plain face, Leonard voices doubt. "I can't see why, unless you always go around quoting villainous lines from fairy tales."

"Is that what you call it?" the other inquires, slowly coming towards them. "'Fee-fi-fo-fum.' I had wondered. What is an Englishman?"

"So you don't know the rhyme!"

"I know what you know," he tells Leonard. "The story was yours."

"What do you mean, it was Bones'?" Jim asks.

The black-haired man switches direction suddenly, circling the inner wall. "It was a thought, a memory. I collect them."

And those words, to Leonard, are more frightening than any children's rhyme. 

The man cuts his eyes at them, his gaze lingering upon the rigid posture of Spock. "I see. A man like that one but... bearded. Cold. That must have been an unpleasant experience."

McCoy stiffens. Words hiss from between his teeth. " _Shut up._ " Somehow, this person has spun the conversation like a leaf. Leonard cannot remember what was so funny about him moments ago. Then his thoughts take an unusual turn. The doctor's eyes narrow in consideration of an idea.

Jim doesn't seem inclined to listen to rambling, either, if for different reasons. He points to the open door in the wall. "Where would that lead us?"

"To a quiet stretch of hallway, or on a precarious road to an underwater kingdom—who can tell? There is only one way to find out," they are told.

Jim is fearless. Leonard knows that much. He grabs at his Captain's arm peremptorily, saying, "Not yet."

"If it's the only door..." Jim begins.

"We have an opportunity here, Jim."

The suggestion takes a second to register with Kirk. Jim shoots a speculative, troubled look at Spock.

Spock ignores them both, though he undoubtedly heard their conversation. "Sir," the Vulcan asks, addressing the strange man, "are you telepathic?"

"You are" is the man's response. "By touch, yes?" He smiles faintly, crookedly. "You wish to know my mind."

The Captain's body twitches with an aborted movement.

"Easy, Jim," Leonard murmurs.

Jim turns a hard stare upon the doctor. "What's the danger to Spock?"

"Spock can handle himself."

Jim pulls his arm from Leonard's grip. "Bones, you—" But those words are shoved aside. "You don't know what you're saying."

"I'm thinking Spock can pull answers out of that man's head which might get us home, Jim. How long do you want to run in circles?"

"Are you condoning the practice?" 

There's a warning beneath the question, one Leonard cannot decipher. All he can think to say is "Mind-melding never bothered you before, Captain."

Jim’s look is sharp, his tone sharper. "But it has _always_ bothered you, Doctor McCoy. Especially after— _until now_ ," Jim amends, wanting to remind Leonard that he is privy to what transpired aboard the _ISS Enterprise_ but also abiding by his promise not to break a confidence.

The reminder might as well have been a physical blow. Leonard, struck by it, takes a step back in surprise.

 _Bothered him?_ Why should…? 

At last, the words from his mouth identify with his brain. It becomes painful to breathe. Thoughts jar discordantly with one another as Leonard replays what he said. To propose an invasion when he—he _knew_ the terror of it. A sick feeling settles heavily in his stomach. 

Everyone has grown quiet, or Leonard isn’t able to hear them, except for the person watching him raptly. That mind sings to his, translating a bizarre lullaby or a tale: _This monster, when it could not kill me, reached into me—_

"Bones?"

_—and broke my heart._

"But that hasn’t happened," Leonard whispers, his face taking on an unhealthy pallor.

He recalls the seemingly careless comment which sparked a strong memory: that of mental talons latching onto his mind, digging into it, while the mirrored Spock extracted information he needed (and other information he didn't), leaving Leonard crumpled in the aftermath like a broken doll. Leonard told the man to shut up automatically, defensively, but then he had thought, had…

His body sways.

He had seen a new way to hurt a man and thought, _That might work._

This is wrong, utterly wrong. This is not him. Where is that intrinsic part of himself, his compassion, his morality, his...?

"Jim..." the doctor says as horrified realization sinks in. "Oh god."

Kirk takes his shoulders, ordering, "Bones, look at me. Focus."

"You don't understand..." Leonard swallows hard, his eyes skipping helplessly from a grim-faced Jim to a stoic Spock. He whispers, ashamed, "I’ve lost it. Where did it go?"

Spock approaches, soft-footed, as though he doesn’t want to startle Leonard. "Doctor, do you need to sit down?"

There is a burst of laughter, certainly not Leonard’s because he would rather cry than laugh. It is the room's fourth occupant who is laughing. And as he laughs, he grows: he grows until his head and neck are bent under the roof beams and the shadow of his massive form cloaks the room. They can see nothing but a morbid darkness and a body made ugly by scars and grotesque muscle. 

Meaty hands clap together in delight. " _Fee. Fi. Fo. Fum!_ " the giant chants in his deep, confident voice. The staccato rhyme is a huge, buffeting sound, pushing them backwards as fear would and shattering window panes. 

"I smell the blood of a heartless man!" The giant laughs uproariously then makes a greedy, smacking noise of great hunger and leaps for them.

“Door!” Jim shouts.

Leonard wouldn't have moved if Jim hadn't bodily hauled him towards the door. The truth is it no longer matters to him if he is killed by a creature of this otherworld. They've already taken the part of him he treasured most.

But Jim won't let him go. Spock will come after him if he is left behind. What can he do but run?

Gingerbread men, the doctor thinks despairingly. That's all we are. Running as fast as we can.

~~~

They fly down a hallway checkered with endless doors. When the giant's footsteps are a faded thunder, Jim chooses a door at random and pulls Bones in after him. Spock is on their heels.

Kirk takes a split second to catch his breath and identify any immediate threats at their new location, another round tower room, of which he sees none. Then he faces Spock. They stare at each other but have nothing to communicate. He cannot think of a single thing that isn't too frightening to say. Beside him, McCoy tugs on his arm, a surreptitious reminder that Jim's hand is still shackling his wrist. Reluctantly, Jim lets go of the man.

McCoy looks ill, miserable, like the last star of hope has faded from sight. He stares at them with a flat darkness to his normally periwinkle-blue eyes.

Something is terribly wrong, and it's not simply because McCoy had had a maudlin moment where he intended to let the giant hurt him.

"How can I help you?" Jim asks quietly, studying the face of his friend.

"You can't," the other man croaks. "Jim... I don't think you or Spock can help me."

"We need to take you back to the Enterprise. _Home._ " He emphasizes the word fiercely, praying its power is enough to shake up McCoy.

"I'm sorry" is all that the doctor can say, and turns away.

Spock comes to stand at Jim's side. "Leonard," he says calmly, as if he is voicing the most natural suggestion in the world, "if it is your heart that is missing, I know where we must seek it."

McCoy laughs hollowly. "Where would that be, Spock? Where do hearts go?"

"To the firebird."

Jim stares at Spock. McCoy turns around as well, surprise etched in his face, to look at the Vulcan with wide eyes.

"That is the legend," Spock tells them. "Men lose their hearts to the firebird when they hear her sing."

"The firebird's magic," Jim murmurs. "It would make sense." He paces in a semi-circle around his two officers. "I thought we had separate tasks but maybe..." He looks from Spock to McCoy. "Maybe they're connected. The firebird—and the heart. The Queen said Spock had to earn the firebird's magic, and you, Bones, have to show us where your heart lies. Two pieces to the same puzzle... to solve the same problem?"

"Jim," McCoy says to him, "you can't go after the firebird."

"Why not?"

"It's dangerous, for one thing. You don't know how _strong_ she is, how... easy it would be to follow her."

He straightens. "I'll take my chances."

The doctor touches a hand to his forehead, grimacing. "I knew you'd say that."

"Then why tell me not to go?"

"Because I had to try, didn't I?" the doctor says cryptically. He sighs. "I want you—you, too, Spock—to promise me something, if we're going to do this."

Jim says cautiously, "I can't keep every promise I make, Bones."

"Then promise to try."

"All right. What is it?"

Jim notices the way McCoy rubs a thumb over the ring on his smallest finger, as if to draw strength from it.

"You won't let each other out of your sight. If one of you wanders off, the other goes with him. To bring him back."

Jim wants to know _back from where?_ but that is less important than "What about you?"

"I'm already lost," the doctor says softly, "but they haven't taken you yet." Then he looks to Spock, asking with a touch of his old fire, "So, do you agree, Mr. Spock? Can you keep after the Captain, even if it seems hopeless?"

"Yes," Spock replies.

Bones turns back to him. "Jim?"

"I promise, Bones," he says, though he is still troubled. "But I want you to know I'm not giving up on you." He flicks a glance to Spock. " _We_ aren't giving up on you."

Leonard McCoy says nothing of that additional promise and reaches for the doorknob. "I think the giant's gone. Let's try another room, see if we can find a way out. There won't be a forest in the sky, and a forest is where _she_ will be." 

For the first time, Jim thinks he understands the magnitude of the situation they are trapped in: it's grisly, ugly, dreary. Most of all, though, it is heartbreaking. He hasn’t once shaken that feeling of loss which draped him like a shroud when he saw the body in the desert and thought it was Bones. Even with Leonard McCoy standing an arm’s length away, it’s as though his friend is still missing, still gone.

But he can’t face that possibility yet. If Jim does, Leonard won’t be the only man with a lost heart that needs to be found.


	4. A Quest for One

_Fee. Fi. Fo. Fum._ The stones in the hall floor rattle occasionally with the distant chant. They haven't seen the giant. Either it gave up or had no real intention of catching them. _Figures,_ Leonard decides. _We're being played, pushed around like chess pieces._

Somebody is having plenty of fun at their expense.

Leonard pulls open another door and sticks his head briefly into the room before pulling back again. He slams the door shut with all of the temper he can muster and tries the next door.

 _We're stuck_ is the thought repeating itself in his head. Damn it. Stuck in a tower in the sky for God-knows-how-long. It's not like they can climb down somebody's hair.

Of the three of them, Leonard is the only one slamming doors. He thinks his Captain ought to be displaying some kind of frustration; instead Jim simply seems determined to keep looking, even if he has to investigate one million rooms before he dies of old age. Spock on the other hand, Leonard knows, is a lost cause on the emotional front. The Vulcan slowly and methodically plods from one room to the next.

Leonard stops for a moment to watch said-Vulcan exit his fifteenth room. The doctor imagines Spock's eyes are blinking in such a way that means he finds their hunt to be quite fascinating. Leonard marches over to the Vulcan, intercepting him at the door of the next room on the opposite side of the hall with a sharp "Mr. Spock!"

"Doctor McCoy," Spock says, turning, "what have you found?"

"Nothing! A big, fat nothing, Mr. Spock, and I gather your search has produced much the same."

"Indeed."

"Then what are you grinning about?" he not-quite snaps.

One of Spock's eyebrows shoots up nearly to his hairline.

Leonard locks his hands behind his back in an imitation of Spock and bounces on the balls of his feet. "Don't think I can't tell when you're grinning, mister. What is it, all fun and games to be up here? Is it that damned _fascinating?_ "

Spock doesn't take the bait. Instead, he tilts his head in that maddening way of his and asks, "Doctor, are you well?"

With a noise of disgust, Leonard spins around and stomps back to his side of the hallway. Spock, much to his annoyance, follows him. No doubt thinking he needs a keeper, that his emotions are flying all over the place and compromising their mission!

Spock wouldn't be wrong, but Leonard is more likely to admit he respects a logical viewpoint rather than admit that. He jerks open a door, saying, "You'd better not be following me, you pointy-eared hobgoblin...!" In his distraction, Leonard completely misses the fact that the room is without a floor. His foot passes through air and he falls forward with a surprised "Oh hell!", quite literally a heartbeat away from falling off a cliff—

—and is wrenched backwards by the collar of his blue uniform.

"It appears you have found something, Doctor McCoy."

"Yeah," Leonard says, trying not to sound as flummoxed as he feels. "T-Thanks, Spock." His anger is suddenly gone. "I'm, uh, sorry I yelled at you. …Not sure why I was so mad."

"Your emotions are less stable than usual," Spock states in a tone of voice too mild to register as a taunt. Leonard is duly shocked into silence. "I do not believe this is entirely of your doing," the Vulcan continues. "Other ...forces are exerting influence over your state of mind."

"So I'm not a complete basket-case." Leonard’s relieved sigh is not quite an exaggeration.

Spock has latched onto something infinitely more interesting than a door that opens at the edge of a cliff. "'Basket case?' I do not understand precisely, Doctor. How is a basket a euphemism for insanity?"

"How should I know? My mama always said it, and my mama's mama. So I guess it's learned speech."

"You never researched the origin of the phrase." Spock's eyebrows express the absurdity of the notion.

Leonard's eyes roll heavenward. "Are you telling me you haven't inadvertently adopted a single habit of your parents'?"

"If I had the means to—"

"Hey, what's going on? Have you found something?" Jim calls as he jogs down the corridor, no doubt wondering why his two officers are loitering in the hallway instead of performing their assigned tasks.

"Sure did, Jim. Spock's really putting a dampener on the 'nuture' side on an old psychological debate. Apparently he popped straight outta his momma as a walking, talking computer."

Jim looks to Spock, completely confused.

Spock blinks steadily. "Doctor McCoy almost fell off a cliff."

Leonard's mouth drops open at the unjust comeback. "W-Why y-you—tattletale!"

Jim shoulders him aside, already too preoccupied by the idea of a cliff to listen to McCoy's sputtering. The Captain peeks over the threshold of the open door and whistles. "That's a long drop."

"Indeed."

"And you saved Bones?" Jim guesses. "Good work, Spock." He claps a friendly hand on the Vulcan's shoulder.

"Never mind me," Leonard grouches from the side.

Jim's mouth twitches. "You want congratulations for almost dying, Doctor? I have to say, congratulating you isn't the first thing that comes to my mind."

"It wasn't my fault," Leonard says somewhat contritely.

Spock opens his mouth to speak. Jim raises a hand to stall the comment. "So we found a room which isn't a room. What's next?"

"What do you mean—what's next? It's a cliff, Jim. We aren't going to jump off it."

Immediately, he wishes he'd swallowed the words. Jim's face lights up. Leonard backs away from the door. "No. _No_ , that's _crazy_! Even I'm not that crazy!"

"We jumped into a tree which could displace itself," Spock muses.

"We also jumped _off_ a tree the size of New York’s old Empire State Building," Jim adds.

"See, the common factor is trees!" Leonard almost shrieks, only calming his voice in time to sound like he is squeaking. "I guarantee you, Jim-boy, this is a test to see if you're dumb enough to throw yourself off a mountain side. Not everything here is real, but that doesn't mean everything is magical either. You could still end up dead!"

Spock looks intrigued. "What is the alternative if a thing is neither real nor magic-based?"

Jim folds his arms and plants his feet which reminds Leonard too much a man taking root to weather a storm. So the doctor does the only thing he can: he walks away.

"Bones!"

They won't do something so foolish without him. If he can find another door (and a safer way to the ground) he can worry about Jim and Spock that much less.

 _You're stalling,_ the condescending voice in the back of his head tells him. _You're already afraid of what's going to happen when you reach the firebird._

He hates that know-it-all voice, even if it is his rational side talking to his normal, blundering self. Ignoring it, Leonard reaches for a doorknob the moment Jim takes a hold of his arm, having caught up to him.

"Bones..."

"No, Jim," he says firmly, throwing open the door to another room. "There has to be—"

Sunlight blinds them. Using his hand to shield his eyes, McCoy barely makes out the figure standing in the middle of the white room but he sees her face for an instant, just an instant, and that is enough. The overly bright light disappears, taking the woman with it. Leonard blinks several times to clear his vision of white spots from seared optical nerves. At his side, Jim pinches the bridge of his nose with a noticeable grimace.

Leonard places a hand on Kirk’s arm. "Take a deep breath," he says softly to the man. "Is it bad?"

"No," Jim says, dropping his hand. "It's just—I was prepared for..." _pain_ , he doesn't finish. "But I'm all right, Bones."

"I know, Jim," the doctor says with sympathy. He flicks a glance at their surroundings. "This isn't the best place for a migraine, anyway. I've got nothing to treat you with," he ends gloomily.

"I feel fine."

Leonard eyes his friend. "If you're sure... It wouldn't hurt if we take a minute to relax. De-stress... just until you're certain, Jim."

Jim's smile is mirthless. "I can't remember a life without stress, Bones," the man admits. He rubs a hand over his face, huffing out a sigh. "Besides, I doubt I could ever feel comfortable here. Do you know we haven't sleep in days?"

He nods. "Or eaten. Our bodies are sustained somehow by the environment. I haven't figured out how it works yet."

"Magic." Jim mutters the word like a curse.

Leonard becomes aware of Spock is standing slightly to the right of them, having stayed nearby in case he might be needed but not close enough to seem like an interloper in Kirk and McCoy's discussion. Leonard motions him over and points to the room beyond the door. "We've found our exit, gentlemen."

"What did you see?" the Vulcan asks him, fixing his dark eyes on McCoy's face.

"Gram."

"Could it have been a trick?" Jim asks.

"I don't think so, Jim. She smiled at me, and while that's a pretty rare event, it was definitely her." He hadn't exactly thought of the smile as encouraging but something in Leonard knows she is telling him how pleased she is. _Gram probably thought it was about time I showed the steel in my backbone._

Jim says "Okay" and squares his shoulders. "Let's go."

But it is Leonard who hesitates again. "Do you remember your promise?"

The look Jim shoots him is both amused and slightly grim. "We do."

"Don't follow the firebird—"

"Bones, we're prepared."

"—and _don't_ lose sight of each other."

Jim enters the empty room. Leonard and Spock follow him. In the instant the door snaps shut of its own accord, the room fills with light, grower bright and brighter until Leonard hunches in on himself, thinking _this is how it feels to be blind, not with darkness but light... too much light, blocking out every detail._ When it finally abates, he is standing inside a forest. It's night.

And he is alone.

~~~

In the unrelenting fog, the men can see nothing. They cannot move for fear of where they might tread.

"Do you understand now?"

James Kirk, incensed, whirs around to face the woman speaking. "Where is he? What have you done!"

Gram merely levels an even stare upon the man. "Your doctor is not the man you once knew. He is not the man you came to save. Do you still intend to free him?"

"Is this why you separated us from McCoy?" Jim asks, rage deepening in his voice. "Do you _think_ we would leave him here, no matter what state he was in?"

"That is not my choice, but yours."

Jim takes a carefully controlled step away from her, clearly fighting one of his baser instincts to lash out. "I've had enough of this game you're playing, Gram. In case it wasn't clear before, let me make it plain to you: Leonard McCoy does not belong to you or anyone on this world. He does not belong to me, either, but he _is_ my friend in addition to being my responsibility. That gives me the right to demand he is treated with fairness and respect and allowed free will, and to remove him from a situation where he is not. I have seen none of those things from your people. Therefore Leonard _won't_ be staying. I don't care what he is or isn't."

"And if he were a threat to your other... responsibilities?" Gram prompts mildly.

Spock's immediate response has a sharp edge to it: "Doctor McCoy is not a threat."

She studies the Vulcan. "Your belief is strong."

"I have seen no evidence to the contrary."

"Fascinating," she says as he would. "I watched him threaten you."

The Vulcan's brows draw downward. "Those are not— _sincere_ —threats. They are part of the doctor's peculiar manner of communication."

"Look," Jim interrupts, "we are not here to debate Bones' habits. They are what they are. What I want is McCoy returned to my ship." Kirk repeats, his tone hard, "Where is he?"

"He is on the path to find his heart."

"Take us there."

"No," Gram says.

"That wasn't a request!" Kirk snaps.

"It is a trap."

Jim's hands tighten into fists, both paling and filling with purpose at that statement. In his stead, Spock speaks. "Then you wanted the Captain and I to avoid the trap, but not Doctor McCoy. Why?"

"The Queen would see you fail," the woman says simply. "I would not."

It is clear Jim believes her though he detests how she accomplished her task. For McCoy, who is without them, he appears deeply worried. "Tell us what we're supposed to do, Gram."

"The leader and the wise one," Gram murmurs. "Find the firebird," she tells Spock, "and she will ask a favor of you. Yours," to Kirk, she says solemnly, "is the more difficult task. Blood and bone. I can advise of only one thing, Captain: when the time comes, hold him fast. If he is your friend as you claim, you must see that in him and not let go." Finished, Gram sighs softly and seems to fade, as though her power is diminished by all that she has said.

"Where is the firebird?" Jim asks of her.

"By law, only the Vulcan should seek her."

Jim shakes his head, jaw stubbornly set against the idea. "I made a promise. I must go with him."

He could have said he would go with Spock regardless of any promise but Gram nods at his choice of words. "Then you must. A word given is a law unto itself. It is wise that you have said so; otherwise, to break your promise would only turn magic against you—and that you can ill afford."

"As you say," Jim mutters grimly. He turns to Spock. "Ready?"

"Affirmative, Captain."

Gram is gone when he looks for her again, but with her departure, the fog has faded. Jim and Spock can see where they are, not at the edge of a forest, but at the door of a hut. Though they are not at the seaside, Jim recognizes the wind chime hanging beneath the eaves. Since this is Spock's quest, he stands aside while the Vulcan knocks.

"Finally, a polite visitor! Well," comes a querulous voice, "don't dawdle. Come in—but don't you dare attempt to steal my white hen! I've got a pot big enough for thieves!"

~~~

Panic sets in and stays with Leonard no matter how far he runs or what direction he takes through the forest. It chases his heels and spurs him onwards; he circles around pine trees that loom immense and ancient and so tall they might be near to touching the night sky. Sometimes he imagines their branches reaching out like clawed hands to hook his clothes, but those hands never capture him. Leonard keeps running.

"Jim!"

"Spock!"

He shouts himself hoarse, only realizing once his voice can no longer carry that he has been fooled again.

What is the point in separating them? They weren't close to solving any mysteries yet. They weren't doing anything but bumbling through the otherworld with an ant's view.

"We weren't going to win!" He whispers it because he is unable to yell.

_Is that what you wanted to hear, whoever you are?_

He stops running then, stumbles, and almost sinks to the ground, catching himself against a wide, rough tree trunk.

This maze is so simple—an endless expanse of trees, a sea—that he knows he will never find his way out again. He is well and truly trapped; he will become the crazed king in some horrific tale, wandering around digging graves, trying to find his death. This is when he needs to be less human, he thinks, so no walls, no magic, could imprison him. Without being Other, he has no power to become the stone he sees, the bird that flies between the bars of its cage.

Yet Leonard McCoy is not so untouched by the otherworld he does not perceive what is there that does not want to seen. "Who are you?" he asks, and adding in the same breath, "Go away!"

When he turns, the firebird is watching him in her human form. Her lovely face is round and luminous in the dark, and her body is framed by a tumbling fall of flame-colored curls. He stills, fearing that if he releases too loud a breath she will disappear. Simultaneously leaning forward and pushing away from the tree, Leonard cannot help but anticipate a song, thought it will surely fill every thought in his head with only her. Already, most of his thoughts are captivated by her presence. She is magic, a single flower blooming in a desert. What aches and grievances and regrets ailed him before he had borne are unimportant.

But the firebird remains silent, her golden eyes speculative. As the doctor watches, she transforms: her curly hair shortens into feathers and the light in her face dims until he can see something plainer beneath. Leonard's clouded mind becomes clear and sharp again—and fully his own. He steps back against the tree, needing its support to ground him, and draws in a deep breath of night air to rid be of any lingering spell.

The woman shifts, drawing his attention to her again. She is caught somewhere between the beautiful firebird and the hawk-eyed, foul-tempered witch from the hut. Her voice, however, is still liquid fire. "Why have you come to my forest?"

"To ask you to return my heart."

"I told you," the words wash over Leonard, "I did not have your heart." She studies his surprised expression. "You might have given your heart to me once, but you turned from that path and chose another. Even then, you had only half a heart to give."

Disappointment is a sharp bone in Leonard's throat. "Then where is my heart?"

Her golden eyes caress him. "You know where your heart lies."

"But I don't!" he insists. "I—"

She clucks softly. "Why are you here?"

He shakes his head, torn between distraught and exasperated. They are talking in circles. "Because I thought you had my heart."

"That is not my question. Listen." She sings then, loosing lovely notes, cinders falling which make Leonard shudder with pleasure.

He can feel his eyes glazing, the world turning to shadow behind him. "I'd follow you forever," he whispers, moving toward her. A twig cracks underfoot, a disjointed sound.

The singing stops abruptly. "Even without a heart, you would follow me?"

"Yes."

Her arms melt into wings and she turns her face up to the night sky. "That is not what I want most," she tells the white face of the moon. "Where does your true heart lie? What brought you here?"

He swallows. She's planning to leave him, he thinks in despair. "Maybe I don't need it anymore. Not in your world."

Her voice is mixture of a sigh and the chicken lady's sharp squawk. "You told me a heart is never worthless, yet you forget yours so easily. I warned you not to forget."

Leonard hesitates. "I said that?" He muses at length, drawing words from his thoughts. "Maybe I forgot because it wasn't worth much to me."

"Perhaps your heart was worth more to another."

That startles him. Would he give his heart up willingly? That is an easy question to answer: he would. He must have. But not to the firebird.

The woman sings to the moon suddenly, an eerie dirge of burden and loss in a voice older and deeper than the firebird's trill. It could be the story of a single, flickering candle lighting a window on winter's longest night, or the sorrow of a broken-hearted swan. The song goes on until tears are dripping from the doctor's chin. Then it sweeps upward, sweetening, climbing slowly to the sky like roses winding along a trellis. She sings of a heart, blossoming within the shelter of tiny hands.

Still singing, the golden-eyed firebird, no longer a woman, lifts her wings and takes flight, spiraling towards the highest branch of the tallest pine tree. Her song trails after her like flaked fire, falling and melting into the earth below. One ethereal, unfaltering note reaches into Leonard and burrows into an empty hollow within him. The firebird repeats that solitary note as she descends to a branch and, clutching it in her talons, sways dreamily. The note glows beneath his skin, just behind the curve of his ribs.

Leonard stands under the firebird's tree for an eternity. Sometimes he catches one of his stray thoughts and turns it over, inspecting it curiously, before allowing it to drift away again. Always, as he listens and dreams, he is cocooned by the warmth in his chest.

The song, a soft lullaby, fades when the night stars are invisible behind the sun. The firebird is nowhere to be seen.

Leonard comes back to himself and rubs at dried tear tracks on his face. The question is still lingering before him, but this time he thinks he knows its answer.

"Where does my heart lie?" he asks a morning-bright forest. But these trees have no mouths to answer him with.

Tiny hands holding a heart. Tiny, leaf-shaped hands.

Leonard closes his eyes as he lifts his cold face to the warm sun. He remembers how his heart led him from his ship to the children, how his heart had hurt because of the fear in their eyes. And when he had seen what had truly been their fate, his heart had broken.

When a heart breaks, what becomes of its pieces?

Leonard opens his eyes, finally knowing where he needs to be, to seek a path through the trees but can see none. "Help me," he asks of anything that will listen.

A bark draws his attention.

"I can help you," says a small, red-gold figure winding between two trees.

"Red," he says, glad to see the fox. "I need to find the... the birch grove." Would Red know about the children?

Red's black eyes narrow as he tilts his head. This time he is wearing a miniature crown, perhaps to remind the world of what he is beneath his appearance—or to remind himself of what he lost. "Why the birch grove?" the fox wants to know.

"Please help me."

"I, of course, cannot decline such a plea, but you already know that." The fox springs across the forest floor, uprooting fallen leaves and other forest debris in his wake. "Follow me!"

Gratefully, Leonard does.

~~~

Leonard and the fox walk through miles of mirrored forest before there is a break in the tall, unwavering pines. Red stops at the tree line, where mist hovers oddly as if to obscure what is beyond, and Leonard pushes through the mist and into a circular grove. The birches, crowded close together, are silent.

"Children," Leonard calls in a whisper.

Leaves stir but whether the wind or the trees themselves are the cause, Leonard cannot tell.

Red barks lightly, catching the man's attention. With his eyes shining brightly through the mist but the rest of him mostly invisible, the fox says, "Ah, I see your reason for coming here. You left something behind, human—a dangerous thing to do in this world. I think it unwise of you to have returned but I am no judge, as equally unwise as I once was and still am!" And with that warning, the fox bounds back into the pines and vanishes as silently as he appeared, his duty to Leonard done.

Alone, Leonard walks toward the birches but this grove isn't as he remembers it. He frowns and finally pinpoints what is different: among their roots grows a wild bush, its thorny branches bent under the heaviness of vividly red blooms. There is a scent of summer roses in the air. He reaches down to rub one soft petal between his thumb and forefinger in admiration. But as McCoy bruises the flower, a hot fire flares beneath his breastbone. He jerks away, gasping at the sensation, not quite painful, and accidentally kicks something on the ground.

An empty cup of beaten metal rolls in between two birch roots, stark silver against the brown earth. Leonard plucks it up in surprise. Gram had given him this cup. He fed the water to the children rather than taking it for himself.

His eyes are drawn down to the solitary rose bush again. A sore ache is spreading through his chest. "My god," he says softly, falling to his knees beside the rose heads and replacing the cup on the ground. Leonard looks to the silent birches. "You've always had it, haven't you? My heart."

Did he mean to give it to them? No, but the gifting had happened so naturally, Leonard did not realize what he had done. How could he? Never has he withheld his heart from children. And these, more than any other children he has known, deserve what kindness can be spared for them.

Leonard withdraws his hand, realizing only belatedly he had been stroking the edge of a rose petal. Folding his legs, he settles on the ground to think. Now he faces a true dilemma: here is his heart, but what if the children need it? How could he take it away from them then?

He lets his face rest in his hands. Time parts and flows around him, unnoticed. At last, McCoy allows himself to listen to the light murmurs around him, conversations without words. Someone giggles.

He stills, slowly withdrawing his hands and easing them into his lap. Leonard looks up to find the trees are watching him, their sleepy eyes set in simple faces of bark. He has the sense the children are happy to see him. Leaves wave playfully, welcomingly in the air. Tears sting the corners of Leonard's eyes.

"I'm so sorry." It's a poor expression to capture his regret but Leonard can think of no other words that might suffice. His mind churns again, restless. He should stay here for a while. Are they lonely? How can he give them more than a comforting presence?

He is close to forming his thoughts into words when the wind carries a new sound into the grove. Leonard freezes, and the birch trees—the children—come fully awake. They rattle their limbs in distress. The doctor climbs to his feet, hushing them. "Quiet," he orders quickly in his firmest grown-up voice, and "Hide!"

Though they obediently return to a glamour of sleeping trees, Leonard can feel the thrum of their awareness just beneath his skin. He paces to the center of the grove, tensed like a hunted animal. The sound of a horn comes again, just ahead, piercing through the forest and the mist. He doesn't realize he is holding his breath until a white stag comes battering through the dense underbrush. It veers when it sees Leonard, its red eyes rolling, and plunges mindlessly into the birches. The children cry out, frightened.

Another figure forms just inside the misty tree line, coming toward the grove more slowly, a great lumbering beast. Not a beast, Leonard amends, as it enters the grove: the Queen, mounted on a midnight steed.

"Tithe-payer." In the Queen's pale hand is a golden horn carved with a ring of oak leaves. Her eyes skim the grove; as they pass Leonard, invisible icy fingers plunge into his chest and crush the firebird's note. The world grays and when it returns, Leonard is on his knees in the clearing struggling to breathe. "So," she says, "this is where your heart lies—and where my children have been hiding. You have done well."

His mouth opens in wordless horror.

The Queen raises her horn and blows a single, cold note. Out of the mist come more mounted riders, spilling into the grove like a silvery river. Their horses are fierce and foaming, seemingly mad; the riders, regal and grotesque in their plated armor and antlered helmets.

This is the Hunt, Leonard realizes, here for prey. Prey he led them to.

The birches shudder and weep sap. As the grove is invaded, its magic is destroyed: white bark peels; branches snap like brittle bones; summer leaves wither into dust. The trees vanish, and in their place is a huddle of thirty-two children, who clutch at each other's hands in fear.

Leonard forces his body to ignore his pain and climbs to his feet with an angry shout. "You can't have them!"

"I shall," the Queen of the Wood replies, "for they have always been mine," and lifts a commanding hand to her hunters. "Bring their magic to me—" Her eyes are smiling in triumph though her mouth is stone. "—and the tithe-payer's heart."


	5. At the Heart's End

The Story-teller sat in a rocking chair. Around her, children formed half-moon rows, their young faces reflecting the gravity of the nightly gathering.

"Not all stories are happy," she began. "Not all stories can end as we want them to. What I tell you now, my children, is a story that will turn the heart cold. It will keep you awake until the darkest hour of the night, trembling in your beds—but I must tell it to you. Silence is the greater evil. Fear will be your boon."

She fell silent and closed her unseeing eyes as if to savor the tune made by her words. The children knew her from another tale as the mumbling old woman collecting twigs on the forest floor for her fire. She alone remembered the names of the monsters in the world when all others had forgotten. They wanted to learn the names of those monsters too, so they waited for her to speak again.

"Once upon a time there were three brothers. The eldest brother was the strongest, the youngest brother was the kindest, and the brother of an age between them was the smartest. Separately, the brothers were respected but together they were truly feared for their formidable power. It is said that once these brothers destroyed and repaired all worlds in a heart beat's time. Though that is a great tale itself, tonight I share with you the story of how they came to lose one another—and how that loss changed everything they held dear."

Some children drew quiet breaths; others leaned together, shoulder to shoulder. They were ready to face what they must, as she bade them, and accept fear. They knew already of their own tragic fates.

~~~

The woman in the hut has to be Bones' chicken lady, Jim decides as he slips through the door behind Spock.

The instant he is seen, the woman starts squawking. "Get out! Get him out!"

Spock is the picture of politeness. "I am Mr. Spock. My companion is James—"

"He's _the_ Captain Kirk!" the chicken lady snaps. "Of course I know who he is! Get him out!" She comes at Jim with an over-sized broom. "Shoo, you rascal, SHOO!" Jim dodges like a youngster with years of practice, and the broom narrowly misses his head.

"Spock!" the Captain shouts when the chicken lady has him cornered between a table and a wall and raises her household weapon with clear, violent intent.

She makes a noise of surprise as the broom is taken away from her and deposited in an unoccupied corner of the hut. The woman whirls around, confronts the Vulcan thief, and demands, "What right do you have to steal my things!"

The Vulcan thief merely looks at her.

Jim lifts his hands, palms outward. "Why are you attacking me? What have I done?"

"Done? Done!" But she seems to be calming down, her voice no longer shrill. "It is not what you have done, foolish man, but what you will do!" Her black eyes pin him like a butterfly to a parchment. "I cannot be wooed."

His face flushes. "Excuse me?"

Spock angles away from them and studiously watches a small white hen, who in turn tracks the progress of a black beetle across the dirt floor until it is within range. Then the hen snatches the beetle up and crunches it with a razor-edged beak.

The woman snorts and eyes Kirk warily. "I am not some fluff-brained beauty—"

 _Definitely not that_ , Jim thinks.

"—who can be dazzled by your handsome face—"

His ego perks up, interested.

"—and your princely charm!"

It would be completely inappropriate to laugh. Jim tries his best not to.

"There it is!" she shrieks, pulling at her feathered hair. "Stop smiling!" Hurrying to the other side of the room, she digs through a basket in great haste. Having found what she needs, the incensed (and somewhat desperate) woman stomps to a cauldron filled with simmering liquid and flings a root into it. Enormous billows of purplish-black smoke rise in the air; then the smoke shimmers, becoming into a lazy green coil.

Jim hesitates to ask what she is doing.

She cuts her eyes at him as though he had given voice to the question. "Do you know what creature is the antidote to temptation in this universe, Captain Kirk?"

He almost mutters "A Klingon" but decides she isn't likely to have met one.

The woman chants something in the direction of the pot and the fire beneath it explodes in a shower of sparks. Cackling, she retrieves her broom, stirs the murky liquid with its handle, and answers for him: "A frog. Who would risk her virtue over a hazel-eyed frog?" She fills a cup from the cauldron and tells the man to drink from it.

Jim sidles closer to Spock, declining the near-command firmly.

"I said drink it! I can't look at you in that form and think!" She adds as an afterthought, "The spell shouldn't be permanent."

Jim makes an executive decision. "I'll just wait... outside... for the two of you to conclude your business."

Once he is leaning against the opposite side of the closed door, he sighs noiselessly with relief. Surely, promise or not, McCoy wouldn't begrudge him this one act of cowardice. Besides, Jim appeals to his common sense as Spock does to logic, it would be utterly impossible for him to help them return to the Enterprise if he was no bigger than the toe of a boot.

Of course, there is another, small matter which keeps James T. Kirk out of the witch’s hut: Jim very much suspects Spock would choose dignity over loyalty when it comes to kissing frogs.

~~~

"Hmph," the woman says to the closed door. She takes a sip from the cup held steady between her golden talons.

Clasping his hands behind his back, Spock asks curiously, "What did you add?"

"Ginger-root," she replies, grinning. "I like a bit of spice to my tea."

"Then I assume the tea lacks in magical properties."

"Mostly," she agrees and motions to a chair made of bleached bones. "Have a seat, Spock, and let's—as your Captain said—discuss our business." She settles in an identical chair and levels a stern gaze, almost a glare, upon him. "You seek the firebird. Why?"

"I must," Spock tells her, "if I am to save my friend."

" _Friend_ ," she mutters under her breath. As if summoned, the white hen pecks into its way over to the chairs, and the witch bundles the hen into her arms. "You speak of a man who disrespects you when he can get away with it; a man who nettles you with unkind words and expects you not to feel their sting. Why should I lend my help so that you may save him?"

Spock's posture is perfectly straight, controlled, but it is his fingers, which tick lightly against his knees just once, that give away his reaction to her accusations. She smiles knowingly and strokes the hen’s glossy white feathers with her talons.

"Let me advise you, Spock: recognize your opportunity. Be rid of this nuisance in your life. Would you not be..." She pauses, cocking her head. "...more efficient without him?"

Spock stands. "I cannot agree with your presumption. Doctor McCoy is not a detriment to the Enterprise."

"When did I mention your starship?"

Their eyes meet; neither yields to the other.

After some seconds, Spock challenges softly, "Doctor McCoy means me no harm."

She clucks. "Liar."

His eyes turn to chips of black ice. “I do not lie. If you know so intimately of our relationship, as you insinuate, then you also know the doctor has saved my life—"

"What do precisely calculated numbers mean to me?" she interrupts.

He leaves his sentence unfinished and turns for the door. "I have no time to spare for a debate with an irrational being."

It is her laughter which stills him before he reaches the door. "Oh, how wonderfully foolish!" the witch cries. "Do you think I am like your friend—that you can walk away and leave me sputtering to myself?" The door disappears. She rises, tucking the white hen under her arm, and chuckles darkly. "I am not your Doctor McCoy, Mr. Spock. When our conversation is done, it will be my word that ends it."

His hands fall loosely to his sides. "The doctor mentioned your rudeness. I see he was correct."

Her body snaps bow-string taut, tense with outrage, and the shadow of her upon the floor loses its shape until it is a large blotch of darkness staining the dirt. Spock watches in silence as the red feathers sprouting from her head melt into hissing snakes.

"YOU—YOU—!"

He waits, interested to see what she will fling at him.

"—CRUDE MENACE! YOU—HOBGOBLIN!"

Swiftly and without fear, the Vulcan approaches her, heedless of the snakes baring their fangs at him. "You cannot use that word. It does not belong to you." His tone is implacable.

The monstrous woman draws back as if to strike a blow but, surprisingly, she deflates all at once. The earth swallows her shadow, and the snakes on her head fade into a crazed nest of dull red hair.

Her mouth makes a wordless shape, and a bitten-off noise escapes from it. "It is not my word," she agrees, groping behind her for the edge of her bone chair. Silently, the witch’s chest heaves. "Name your price."

He almost asks her to explain her abrupt change of mind but he recognizes the gem hidden beneath the oddness of her offer. Past experience has taught him not to ignore such an opportunity. "I wish to meet the firebird."

Her eyes grow unfocused as she looks past him, seeing something he cannot. “My hen," she says roughly, "take my hen."

"I wish to meet the firebird," he states again.

"Then you must," she sighs. Long, pale fingers replace her talons. She snags them in the knots in her hair. "I will show you the firebird," the woman says, her voice lighter than before, "but then you will go."

He promises.

What happens then is not something the Vulcan will recall with clarity. The hut wavers, a desert mirage or a mirror's illusion, and vanishes. He is standing in a clearing among tall pines. Day has fallen into dusk.

"Spock?" The Captain strides toward him, his face still sporting a hint of alarm. "What happened?"

"I am not certain," Spock admits.

Jim lays a hand on the Vulcan's shoulder, tightening his fingers only momentarily as to assure himself Spock is really there. "I thought I had—" But Kirk doesn't complete his sentence, instead pressing his mouth into a thin, unhappy line. "McCoy was right. We can't separate again, Spock. I should have known better the first time."

His hand drops away, and they turn, shoulder to shoulder, to observe their surroundings.

The pine trees are old things crowded together in perpetual silence. Their branches seem to make shadows out of nothing. Occasionally, a squirrel or a small creature changes its location in a tree, causing pine needles to rain upon the forest floor. The snuffling in the underbrush might be a badger. But there is no indication of an exotic bird.

Jim is the first to spot the vague glittering through the canopy; Spock, however, is the first to hear the song.

It drifts into the clearing, lending an ethereal quality to the silence of the ancient pines. Traces of color flicker in and out of the trees, weaving a pattern in harmony with the song’s notes. Next to Spock, Jim is completely silent, his gaze transfixed ahead for glimpses of the firebird.

Spock remembers McCoy's warning. He reaches down and brushes the tips of his fingers against the underside of his Captain's wrist, only to jerk them back as if burned—for something has set fire to Jim's emotions but at the same time muted the vibrancy of his thoughts. Instinctively, Spock places himself in front of Kirk. He considers how to combat a spell of song. It could be possible, if he had to, that a carefully shaped barrier around the human's mind would hold against it.

"Captain," he says urgently.

Jim's mouth stretches in an absent smile. "Spock," the man murmurs, "can you hear it?"

"Captain, focus on my voice."

Jim pushes past him, not listening. "I've never heard anything so beautiful. She wants...I must..." As he speaks, he wanders to the edge of the clearing, soon to be lost among the pathless trees.

"Jim," Spock apologizes from behind him, "I am sorry."

The firebird appears in a tree at the same moment Spock reaches for his Captain's neck. A gasp of wonder flies out of Jim like the final word on the subject of his enchantment before he slumps to the ground. With Kirk crumpled and oblivious at Spock's feet, the firebird stops singing and clings to her branch in silence. Her fiery plumage sways in sinuous waves against the gloomy backdrop of the forest.

Spock contemplates his words to her, and a story he once heard from a scholar, and settles on, "I am Spock, son of Sarek. I have traveled here to seek a gift from you."

The silence continues.

He clasps his hands behind his back and waits.

The firebird glides to the forest floor, changing her appearance as she goes, until a lovely woman stands just within the line of trees. Her eyes are golden and her hair is a rich red. "What gift would you have of me?" she asks.

"Any magic you can spare" is his solemn answer.

"Magic must be earned."

"How must I earn it?"

"Give me a gift of greater worth than my magic and I will tell you."

That is impossible for many reasons. "I cannot judge the worth of your magic."

"What is it worth to you?"

The Vulcan answers honestly. "To me, your magic has no value. I ask for it on behalf of another, so that I might help him."

"Then his value to you is of greater worth." She bends her graceful neck and studies the unconscious Kirk. "Give this man to me in his stead."

"I cannot," Spock says, his posture stiffening slightly.

"If you refuse, how will you earn my magic?"

"I will not trade him. If it is a person you wish to have, then there is only myself."

She lifts her face to a sky dusted with warm colors and a hint of moon. "What are you worth, son of Sarek?"

This, Spock can answer and have his heart agree. "I am worth the life of a friend."

"That is great power," the firebird says softly. "I accept your gift, and your selflessness has earned mine." She gives him a single word; it arrows straight into his heart and settles there.

Spock touches the place on his torso where his physical heart lies, almost expecting to feel a heat beneath his skin. "I do not understand," he says slowly. "How will this help me?"

"Wield it when it is needed most."

"I have used the word before."

"It is a word you have said but never truly shared. I have given it the power to be heard." The firebird sings a solitary note then, which spirals toward the treetops and beyond, never to descend until it reaches the farthest star in the sky. She falls silent, and they listen to its echo for an infinite moment in time.

 _Spock,_ his name brushes his mind, warm and golden and somehow sad, _now I must have your promise. When your life has reached its end and your spirit is unfettered, return to my forest._

"How will I find it?" he asks.

_Your heart sings of loneliness, like mine. It will know the way._

With those final words, the firebird turns and retreats into the forest, bird and woman and Other. When she is a dim glow in the darkness, Jim awakens.

"Ugh," he groans, touching the juncture between his neck and shoulder as if he can still feel Spock's fingers pressing there. "My head."

"I must claim responsibility for your condition, Captain. You were enchanted by the firebird, and there was no less violent alternative than... disabling that which had been turned against you."

"My mind," the man hazards a guess.

"Your thoughts."

Kirk climbs to his feet and brushes dirt from his knees. "Thank you, Commander." He rolls his shoulders. Spock catches the fleeting, pained expression Kirk quickly suppresses but the Vulcan does not remark upon it.

"Jim," he says, choosing informality to gain the man’s attention. Jim glances at him sharply. "I have what I need. Now we must find Doctor McCoy."

Jim looks around them and looses a grim sigh. "I suppose any direction will do."

It is unfortunate, Spock thinks, that he cannot improve that suggestion. They enter the forest.

After a period of silence and Jim's determined underfoot crunching of twigs, Spock stops walking and remarks, "We might benefit from asking for help."

Jim frowns at him. "Who would we ask?"

"An individual is following us, Captain." Technically, it is a shadow but shadows generally do not move of their own accord.

Kirk half-turns in surprise, his eyes expertly assessing the area. Yet, rather than demanding the person show himself, Jim says shortly, "We need your help."

A fox bounds into sight. "Ah," it says cheerfully, "how lovely of you to ask! I am Red." The fox dips its head in lieu of an introductory bow.

When the fox first began to speak, Spock's eyebrows shot to his hairline. Now they are attempting to remove themselves from his forehead entirely. He approaches the fox. "I have only studied instances where an external voice overlay is integrated with an animal lacking in developed phonation to simulate speech. May I request that you speak again?"

"Ha!” the fox barks, amused. "If I look strange to you, how do you think you look to me?"

"Fascinating. And what is the purpose of the crown on your head?"

"Spock," Jim interjects, laying a hand on the Vulcan's arm as a subtle reminder of what they should focus upon. "Forgive my friend," Kirk tells Red. "We—rarely—encounter talking foxes."

The fox languidly circles Kirk's boots and noses the ground, saying in an imperious voice, "I am greatly offended. You do not remember me, and I gave you some of my best advice!"

Kirk starts. "You're... the man with the lantern?"

" _Prince_." The fox grins, despite his pointed tone. "Which is what I once was. …But enough of that. You asked for help. What shall I help you with, captain-ly Kirk?"

"We have lost our third companion and must find him."

"I see." Red’s bushy tail brushes against a tree trunk as he slinks past it. "You speak of the man with the ring?"

"He does wear a ring," the Vulcan confirms.

"I used to wear rings: gold rings, silver rings, jeweled rings. Wealth meant more to me than all else, even true love. Sadly, a fox has no need of wealth."

Spock wonders, then, why Red is wearing a golden crown. Instead he asks, "Would you know where to find Doctor McCoy?"

"Your companion passed through here. He too wanted help, to find something he had lost, and I took him to the place it had been left behind."

Jim steps forward, hope flashing across his face. "Please show us the way, Red."

But the fox shakes his head, a very human gesture. "You won't find him there. Some time ago, I heard a noise I did not like and hid. Dreadful bracken caught my fur! Never mind. It was the Queen's Hunt and he was with them. My condolences," the fox says, "for your loss."

"Then we want to find the Hunt," Kirk insists.

Red is silent for a full minute, regarding them. At last he turns and agilely leaps ahead into the trees. "This is not wise!" calls the fox. "Not wise at all, and yet here we go! Follow me, gentlemen, for I know the quickest route to the Wood."

How strange, the Vulcan thinks, that the fox seems so pleased.

Then Red adds, "And when the Queen turns you into foxes or bears or toads, I hope you remember to return and visit me!"

As Doctor McCoy would say, _mystery solved._

~~~

The Wood is the name for the city of trees. Somehow Jim is not surprised this is where they have circled back to. Red, with a jaunty step, leads them straight to a set of stairs built into one of the giant trees. The fox barks a quick goodbye to his future companions (or so he perceives they will be) and dives between two bushes, abandoning them with an ease that suits his fickle nature.

Jim's first foreboding feeling comes when he notices the distinct lack of sentinels guarding the stairs. As they climb, a sensation of disquiet slowly grows at the back of Kirk’s neck. The hutches in the trees appear vacant. No curious or disapproving faces watch them ascend into the city. It is like the desertion before the approach of a terrible storm.

Courtesy of a Vulcan’s eidetic memory, Spock guides them from platform to platform and across vine bridges. Finally, as they come to the opening of the hall, the sense of aloneness fades away. Jim breathes in deeply, recognizing power from within as he stands upon the hall’s threshold. Spock seems aware of it as well and the Vulcan's shoulder, whether by accident or design, briefly connects with his. They enter the long, cavernous room, and immediately Jim knows something portentous has happened. Silvery voices come from everywhere, and steps too, slowing, tapping away in many directions. The hall seems full-to-bursting with Court members who are, Jim realizes, celebrating.

But that no longer matters as Jim spots the person he wants to see most and cries out a name. Instantly, a sentinel—tall, sinewy, gold-haired—appears and blocks their path, staff in hand. Jim pushes past him without thought, saying again, "Bones!"

Some Court members step aside, flustered; others grow very, very still and watch Kirk and Spock weave among the crowd. If Jim knocks into a man and that man flushes pale, adjusting the skewed spectacles upon his nose, Jim does not notice. Jim is focused on reaching McCoy and nothing else.

A very short woman appears at the elbow of the spectacled man and murmurs, "Did I not warn you, Rowan?"

Sir Rowan stares after the two humans, asking weakly, "What have you done to us?"

Gram, her triumph hidden behind a placid expression, merely replies, "This is what happens when you hunt those who are not weaker than you."

~~~

McCoy is with the Queen, kneeling before her like a supplicant. He has not stirred since Jim called his name.

The Queen drums her fingers against the arms of a throne made of twisting tree roots. Her words slide coolly toward the interlopers. "Only fools invite themselves into my hall."

Ignoring her, Jim lays a hand upon the doctor's shoulder. As he does so, the wooden throne shifts, like a beast restless in its slumber.

"You come too late. This man belongs to me." As the Queen speaks, an image plays across the minds in the hall, presenting what had been done to him: She had unraveled McCoy's heart, spun it into gold and woven that gold into the metalwork of the silver bracelet adorning her wrist. Every mind feel a sense of how much she enjoys her trinket, and they shudder collectively.

At the Queen’s feet lies a remnant of the heart, a hard, blackened stone.

Jim's fingers unconsciously dig into the doctor's shoulder as he stares at it. "Bones," he whispers, "Bones, we found you. You can come away now."

The man remains unmoved, still kneeling. His face, colorless and harrowed with light, is little more than a mask for the nameless. Jim drops to one knee beside McCoy, takes a hold of the man's arms and shakes him once. "Snap out of it!"

"He is mine," the Queen repeats. She lifts her hand and the doctor rises with the motion. "He obeys only my command."

Jim ignores her. "You belong to no one, Doctor McCoy! Do you hear me? You _can_ walk away."

Laughter echoes, cold and contemptuous. "Do you think you are strong enough to take him from me?"

Jim gathers words to speak, to force McCoy to look at him, but he realizes they will do no good. Instead he demands: "I want my chance to prove my claim. I haven’t had my chance!"

Something, a shadow or a dangerous emotion, blankets the Queen and demands silence. There is not a word, not so much as a flash of silver or a head lifted in surprise from the motionless Court. Some of them have slipped out of their human shapes, to come closer to their makings: shadowy forms that cling to the walls, or wraiths wearing old memories like despair.

Jim, unnerved, looks to his Vulcan officer. The air between them speaks, as brittle as it is, and so does the slight incline of Spock's head. _I am ready,_ he is saying. _I will help. Do what you must._

Encouraged by this, Jim's gaze seeks one additional person, the one who ultimately led them to the otherworld. Who said she believes they can regain the man they lost.

He asks wordlessly of Gram what he must do for McCoy. Within the crowd, there is a glint of black eyes, a sudden flash of teeth. Gram has heard him.

 _Hold him fast_ , the words skate across his thoughts.

Jim doesn't question her, throwing his arms around McCoy and dragging the man against him. In that instant, a lightning rage strikes at the pair of men hard and the doctor changes to reflect it. He is the black-haired giant from the tower, roaring and digging bruises into Jim's arms in a grotesque mimic of a hug. Jim's bones grate together under the pressure.

" _Jim!_ "

Kirk is as equally alarmed as Spock. He gasps in pain and struggles out of instinct. The giant grins at him and loosens its hold invitingly. Jim almost pushes away but Gram catches his attention, now standing just behind them. She looks afraid—but not of the monster McCoy has become.

Jim clamps his hands on the giant's wide forearms and looks into the brutish face. It has mismatched eyes, one of a day's clear sky and the other a midnight blue.

"Bones," Jim calls out, hoping the name is enough.

The rage surrounding them presses in, as perilous and binding as a web. The giant wavers, grows, becomes a three-eyed ogre crushing Jim's throat. Jim doesn't fight back. The ogre turns into a dragon; flames boil down Kirk's arms and burn away his skin. He cries out, and his hands slip across the dragon's slick, black scales. Teeth rip at the raw flesh of Jim's arms until his blood runs. Still he does not let go.

There is a shout, not from Jim, and for an instant the dragon seems suspended, different. But the moment does not last. Scales melt, cool and harden into a smooth, unbroken surface.

Suddenly the hall is gone. The rushing noise in Jim's ears and the pain of his body fall away with it. They are alone, in a place caught between existence and a void, and McCoy is no longer alive. In the circle of Jim's arms is a stoneman, nothing but a faceless being meant to endure an eternity. Jim leans against the standing stone, never lifting his hands from it, and tries to conjure living flesh with memory. While he prays, he glimpses the exposed bone of his arm beneath a shredded muscle and turns his face from the sight. His prayer becomes a single, whispered plea: "Bones, come back."

The stoneman shudders, cracks, and lifts a foot. The void trembles under the ponderous step and becomes earth again. But the stoneman moves no more, instead beginning to crumble into dust and rose petals.

Jim panics, feeling the man he once knew literally slipping through his fingers. "No!" he shouts to whatever is listening. "You can't take him like this! I haven't let him go yet!"

He drops to his knees and buries his hands into the earth, desperately searching for what was once his friend. His fingers encounter a nose, slide over a cheekbone. Jim plunges his hands deeper and drags forth a familiar face framed by dark-brown roots. McCoy's eyes open, rounded with surprise and recognition.

Jim's voice splinters. "B-Bones?"

"Jim?"

"I've got you," Jim tells the man fiercely. He thrushes his arm up to the elbow into the soil, soft and smelling of peat, and locates a shoulder. Enough tugging brings McCoy fully out of his grave. The man’s body is not caught by roots, as Jim thought, but encircled by them. They originate from a cavity in Leonard’s chest.

Jim doesn't care. He flings around an arm around Leonard's shoulders, only vaguely realizing his wounds are gone, or perhaps were never real. Tentatively, hands touch Jim's back then spasm and twist into his shirt.

The man sags against Kirk. "Jim, where...? Something happened."

"It's okay now," Jim whispers into hair laden with dirt. "I'm not letting go," he promises.

The ground beneath them shudders. Jim opens his eyes, unaware he had closed them at the moment Leonard touched him, and sees that they are, in fact, somewhere new. Next to them is a dead rose bush, torn out of the ground by its roots and cast aside. Roses lay scattered and ruined.

A shadow falls across the two men—the Queen, eyes angry and hair shedding old spider webs. She wrenches the silver bracelet from her wrist and tosses at their feet.

"I have others for what I need," she tells them and lifts a golden horn to her lips, releasing a piercing note. A summons.

Leonard jumps in Jim's arms. "The children—Jim, she has the children!"

And Jim can see them now, girls and boys of varying young ages, cowering in the shadows of the ancient oak he had once clung to and ridden from a mountaintop. The Tree's Keeper, if he is hidden among the oak branches, does not want to be seen.

 _Coward_ , Jim thinks and, _a servant of the Queen._

Leonard tries to pull away. Jim snaps "Don't!" and tightens his arms around McCoy.

The Queen, eyes fixed upon the children, beckons two of her huntsmen to her side. Jim, along with Leonard, stiffens when the huntsmen raise long bows, already notched with arrows, and take aim at the group of wide-eyed children.

"No!" Leonard cries but it is too late.

The hunted scream. Two of those screams die abruptly. A boy and a girl drop to the ground, feathered shafts protruding from their chests.

"They must be sacrificed in pairs," the Queen explains, "because they are so young."

Each huntsman pulls another arrow from his quiver. As they take aim again, the Queen focuses on the two men, not the children, as if waiting for their rebellion.

Leonard struggles to stand up. Jim anchors him to the earth, having seen that look of the Queen's on other faces, the faces of enemies who think they need only wait for a fool to act so they can win a war. So he does not let go of the doctor and instead presses his forehead into one of McCoy's bony shoulders, enduring both his friend's clawing hands and an ugly memory returning to haunt him.

"Jim, let me go!" the doctor demands then rages then begs. "Jim! JIM!"

The children aren't simply screaming now, but crying. They're crying in horrible, hiccupping sobs. He is not at all surprised to feel tears wetting his own face.

The doctor moans brokenly, "D-Damn you, Kirk, _damn you for this_."

Words cannot find their way past the lump in Jim’s throat.

The roots wrapped around Leonard's body have withered and retracted and dropped away as harmless moldering bones on the ground. The hole in Leonard’s chest has healed itself.

The last of the screaming stops. The huntsmen bow to their Queen, their task done, and retreat. Her eyes linger on McCoy, almost disappointedly, before finally moving away to skim the thirty-two unnaturally still children. She says "You have passed" and without protest—or care—leaves McCoy, Kirk, and the dead where they lay.

In the end, all Jim can do is support a defeated man's weight and hate himself when McCoy turns his face away.

A small creature slowly, hesitantly descends from the Tree. The sickly-skinned troll looks at the bodies scattered among the oak's roots and wrings his hands. "What could I have done?" he asks no one. "What could I have done?"

Equally guilty, Jim closes his eyes and listens no more.

~~~

They might have stayed with their limbs entangled forever, Kirk and McCoy, if Gram does not appear and persuade Jim it is safe to let Leonard go.

Jim's hands begin to shake after he releases the doctor, so he folds his arms to hide them until he can regain his shattered control. Since the captain cannot face the sadness in Gram's eyes, he forces a half-hearted question from his mouth: "Where's Spock?" It is a poor substitute for telling her not to pity him.

"He waits at the bridge," the woman replies gravely.

Jim reaches down and offers the still-seated Leonard his hand. McCoy stands up without help and wanders away from them. During the interim, while Kirk and McCoy sat in shock and grief, the earth had claimed the children. The oak alone marks their grave.

"It was difficult for you," Gram says with a delicate quietness. "I am sorry."

"You lied to me," Jim accuses. "I didn't have to hold onto him. I had to hold him _back_. He'll never forgive me, Gram."

"You are his Captain. You cannot always act as his friend."

"I already knew that!" He faces her as hateful words suddenly swarm at the back of his throat like angry bees. He chooses to swallow them, painful though the act is, but does not soften his unforgiving tone. "What happened here was not a lesson or a test. It was cruelty—and you made me a part of it."

"I never promised you kindness, only a chance to survive." Gram looks past him and asks Leonard, who is watching them wordlessly, "Will you come now?"

McCoy's throat works soundlessly. "Is this a choice? I didn't remember having one before."

"I know."

The doctor's eyes skirt to the oak tree and linger there. "I'll come," he says at last, head bowed.

They leave the grove. Jim walks abreast of McCoy but does not touch him, knowing in his heart the doctor does not want him to. Instead, he keeps his attention fixed on the silent landscape, seeing no beauty or exciting mystery in it now. _I won’t come back here,_ he might be promising himself. _I won't return again._

~~~

Spock peruses the horizon for the river, that mysterious boundary they had crossed from one world to the next. Yet there is only the hazy beginning of a stone bridge. He approaches the bridge's edge, stares at the cobbled stones as if they are prone to movement when he does not watch them; then he retreats again. He can do nothing but repeat this action, for his mind refuses to focus until Gram returns with Kirk and McCoy.

 _If_ she returns with them.

He considers that possibility for the twenty-third time and draws a nuanced plan of what he must to do should it occur.

Planning, the Vulcan realizes, does not cure his inability to focus. This happens to him so rarely that he thinks he should be willing to ask someone why. The ship's counselor would be the logical first choice but Spock has never been entirely comfortable approaching the individual with a personal inquiry. But he could speak to a man with professional training in psychology, if not a career, and Doctor McCoy, despite his teasing nature, always treats those questions with seriousness.

The firebird's gift flares like a light in the darkness at the thought of McCoy.

Spock catches this random turning of his thoughts and attempts to re-organize them. Again, it does not work. They scatter like misbehaving children. Spock closes his eyes and plucks at the nearest thought.

What kind of power does the Queen have that she could transform McCoy so easily? Had it been illusion?

Jim's reaction, however, had not been an illusion. The memory comes back, sharp and poignant, and Spock lets it replay.

The Vulcan had watched, frozen against his will and powerless to intervene, as one beast after another had struck violently at his Captain. He had felt cold at first, with fear for Jim, then recognized an growing anger deep within himself. That anger had wanted to be acknowledged and released, to drive him past discipline. Instead, Spock put strength into his voice because it was the only part of him which remained unbound. He shouted the word burning in his heart over the dragon's roar.

"He is a _friend!_ "

The dragon had stopped tearing into Jim, lifted his head, and looked directly at Spock. Spock knew it was McCoy who had heard him. In that moment, the Vulcan thought he saw the human standing there, frozen and grayish like stone, and not the dragon. Then McCoy was gone, Jim with him, and the hall fell into chaos.

The Queen had cried out then in dismay. She used her power to fling Spock from his feet. Perhaps she would have done worse to the man who had broken her spell, but in the melee Gram had appeared and snatched at Spock's arm. She had told him to run, so he ran. Outside the hall, at the platform's edge, with her hand still locked on his arm Gram had said to Spock, "Jump!"

They did that too, falling not through the city of trees, the Queen's Wood, but into a new—and old—place. Spock had recognized the landscape immediately and wondered what it is they had accomplished to bring them back to the bridge. He knew he didn’t want to be there with Kirk and McCoy. It took Gram threatening him with two choices: let her fetch them or not have Jim and Leonard at all. Even with the only logical choice made, Spock still feels dissatisfied.

He plucks another interesting, scattered thought and examines it. Why had the word _friend_ needed the firebird’s magic to be heard? It was clear McCoy understood him when he said it—and that the word held powerful meaning to the doctor.

But “friend” is still a word Spock has said before in reference to McCoy.

What does that imply? Spock had assumed their friendship was a known fact. The CMO is a person the Vulcan associates with frequently aboard the Enterprise, only second to Jim Kirk. Does it matter that their interaction averages approximately 57% debate (or bantering, as the Captain calls it), 38% work-related activities (which can fluctuate if McCoy is arguing with him about attending his semi-annual physical examination), and 5% superfluous conversation? Spock does not maintain a significant debating average with any other individual, which augments his respect for the doctor.

They are friends. And yet, until now, the word was not powerful enough.

Spock goes to the bridge and contemplates it, only to retreat quickly again like an ebbing tide, quite disturbed.

~~~

Gram could express her gratitude for what these men have accomplished, but they would not believe her. She could show them her heart, and they would not recognize it as human. There is nothing she can do except what she has always done: guide them.

When the healer sees the wise one and the wise one approaches him in concern, he chokes on his words. The leader, called Jim, speaks for his friend, saying heavily, “She killed the children.”

He is also saying, _She killed us too._ For that is apparent to Gram in the way the healer cannot bear to look upon either of the men who risked much of themselves to save him.

They have so far yet to go, but this path is at its end. As she walks with them over the bridge, she lets her own desire sing to it to shape their destination, siphoning some of the magic she has collected for her own to make it stronger than theirs.

 _Carry them home,_ she tells the bridge. _The questing is done. Return them home._

Gram's eyes are accustomed to both worlds, seeing them separate and as one, however she must, and she can easily see beyond the mist. There are tents, people milling about, exactly the home these three need. They will be cared for until they can take care of themselves; it will be longer still until they remember why caring for each other is what makes them strong, not what breaks them. Concerning this, she senses a parting, a divergence already, though it may take years to manifest.

But that is a future Gram is not meant to guide them through. She stops at the bridge’s end, knowing she needs to go no farther; here is her end. The three men trudge ahead, unaware.

~~~

The Story-teller fell silent, having reached an end to the tale of the three brothers.

"What happened to them?" a voice asked.

The children blinked sleepily, reviving from the spell the old woman's story had cast over them, and looked around for the owner of the voice. The Commander, their parents' leader, leaned against a far wall of the room. How long he had been there, listening, none of them knew.

The Story-teller rocked contemplatively back and forth in her chair. "Did you not like the ending?"

"It would have been a better ending if they had died. Less painful that way," the man said gruffly.

"We have faced worse and survived."

"Yes," the Commander agreed very softly, "but not without a terrible price."

She nodded, murmuring, "As it should be." To the children, she beckoned, "Come and listen, little ones. I have another story for you."

"Is this one sad too?" a girl-child asked. "I was sad when the brothers wanted to go away from each other."

Another small child wanted to know, clutching his cousin's hand, "Will they remember they are brothers again?"

"I know no more of the brothers three," the old woman said. "What befalls them next is a story not yet told to me. But shall I tell you what happened to the family they tried to help?"

"Yes!" chorused the children. The Commander slipped away unnoticed.

A mysterious smile played about her lips. "It is said when the brothers returned, heartbroken and unhappy, to console the parents of the lost children, they found the entire village asleep."

"Why were they sleeping?" a child asked around a yawn. "Was it nighttime?"

A little boy curled up in his sister's lap, a thumb in his mouth and his eyelids drooping.

"No," she said, "it was an enchantment. The Evil Witch did not like to share her favorite things, and that village was hers. So she cast a sleeping spell over it which would last for one hundred years. She knew one hundred years would be long enough to persuade other travelers the land was cursed, and so no one else would not want to live there."

Half of the children were already asleep.

One young girl tried her best to fight the Story-teller's story. She asked anxiously, "Did the Evil Witch remember to wake them up?"

"Of course," the old woman said. She watched the child, the murky film over her eyes clearing enough to reveal darkness beneath. "She needed them more than they needed her. She had to wake them up again."

The child rubbed her eyes and frowned at the new face of the Story-teller. "Your hair is funny."

The Story-teller stilled her rocking chair and inspected her long braid of moon-pale hair critically. "What is strange about it, my child?" the woman asked.

The child mumbled something and her chin dropped to her chest. The sleeping spell took her.

The Story-teller plucked a cobweb from her hair and let it drift to the floor. After a time, she rose and went from the room. The Commander was more afraid of the vessel in the sky than the beings the mortals called Them. But he would not remember his fears in one hundred years, as he could not remember his name now. He only knew he had to give the Queen what she wanted—and that was precisely how the Queen crafted her tale's happily-ever-after to be.

 

**THE END**


End file.
